Saving trees is just the start of a transformational journey
“Do well by doing good” is a piece of sound advice made famous by Benjamin Franklin. Today doing good by meeting sustainability goals is high on the priority list of organizations of all kinds. But can boosting sustainability also help a company do well?
When it comes to eliminating paper, the answer is a resounding yes. Because one tree equates to 10,000 pages of paper, countless trees can be saved if companies worldwide go paperless. And the use of paper, besides being costly to the environment, is costly to businesses. Consider the need to purchase, receive, store, and distribute reams of paper throughout an organization. And after work is done, paper must be collected and recycled or archived. It’s a labor-, resource-, and cost-intensive process from beginning to end.
Digitizing documents and storing them as data is far more cost-effective. For example, an AIIM survey of nearly 30,000 CFOs found that capturing information from invoices can make employees four times as productive.1 And eliminating the manual processes that paper requires will enable any organization to accelerate workflows. But going paperless means more than just scanning documents and storing optical-character-recognition (OCR) data as digital files. Going paperless also provides the opportunity to implement information management so that information is accurate, contextual, and searchable. The result is a more agile, responsive organization — one that will more effectively meet customer and partner needs while keeping costs under control.
Consider the case of TIM S/A, a large Latin American mobile telecommunications provider that once relied on paper invoices to bill its 18 million customers, resulting in delayed processing, busy call centers, and costly 10-year archival storage. When the carrier implemented an e-billing system using OpenText technologies, it shed the burden of paper to streamline invoice workflows and storage while empowering customers to access their bills through multiple channels, such as email, Short Message Service (SMS), and messenger apps.
OpenText offers three highly valuable cloud-based services that will make it possible for your organization to capitalize on the paperless opportunity:
Businesses must communicate with each other — that’s what the supply chain is all about — mailings, faxes, and printed forms bog down these communications, however OpenText™ Business Network Cloud is an end-to-end integrated digital backbone and ecosystem that seamlessly connects external business environments to internal business systems. It enables you to plug into a network of more than one million companies to accelerate new-trading-partner onboarding. And you can do it digitally — without having to shuffle paper back and forth — and therefore without being held back from scalable growth or missing out on data insights because of data quality concerns and poor tracking.
Moving beyond paper to automate digital tasks, OpenText Content Cloud™ seamlessly integrates relevant content into workflows so your people can work faster and smarter. Capabilities such as capture and e-signature help automate and digitize paper-based processes for greater efficiency. By transforming paper into business-ready content, improving capture flows, and digitizing tasks, organizations can easily embrace more sustainable business practices.
To meet the growing expectations of customers who want their encounters to be engaging, highly personalized, and omnichannel, OpenText™ Experience Cloud helps organizations efficiently deliver relevant, content-based experiences. By digitizing interactions such as billing, organizations can improve customer satisfaction while boosting their own productivity. And digitizing fax communications helps modernize and streamline operations while removing the burden of paper.
Eliminating paper presents a singular opportunity to do good while doing very well indeed. No doubt Ben Franklin would smile.
1 AIIM, Market Intelligence, 2015.
