How To Measure The Success Of Your Paperless Office Initiative

You’ve set out to become a paperless company, and now you’ve implemented the paperless office software, strategies and processes you need to go 100-percent digital.

Congratulations! But now that you’re paperless, how do you ensure that your new system continues to grow and evolve alongside your company’s needs?

The main reason most companies go paperless is to improve efficiency, so that they’re able to take on more business with the same number of employees. Doing before and after comparisons of your essential business processes should give you a good understanding of everything you’ve achieved by going paperless.

To assess the system installation and setup, start by looking at how well you’ve digitized three key areas: capturing, routing and retrieving information.

1. Capturing information: Are you able to quickly capture all of your documents in your enterprise content management (ECM) system? Have you reduced the number of redundant copies? If you’re capturing information effectively, you shouldn’t see people printing out copies for their own records to track it themselves.
   
   
2. Routing information: Are you able to process documents quickly in a digital workflow? One way to measure this is by how long it takes to process approvals. If it used to take five days and now it takes one day or less, that’s a big improvement.
   
   
3. Retrieving information: How quickly and easily are employees able to find the files stored in your system? A good gauge of success in this regard is how confident your end users are that they could go back and retrieve a document when they need it.

On a high level, have you achieved your goals and fulfilled the mission of going paperless? On a day-to-day level, has the paperless office improved your employees’ work life and job satisfaction?

Documenting Your Paperless Office System

As you move forward with your paperless office, it’s important to remember that it’s a growing, evolving ecosystem, not something you just set up and never think about again. As your company grows, you’re going to want to extend the paperless office into new areas and new processes.

That’s why it’s essential to document the solution you’ve put in place, including results of your discovery and design phases and the system’s configuration settings. Your documentation should also identify the admin users, so that people know whom to contact internally when questions arise.

What you don’t want to have happen is for someone to take over an ECM leadership role from someone else and not understand what the system is doing. Sometimes, when an ECM system has been in place for many years, people may know that it’s still running in the back office, but have no idea what the benefits are or how to use it. When there’s no visibility into the system and nobody knows what it’s supposed to be doing, that capital investment goes to waste.

Documenting your paperless office systems helps ensure consistency, which has long-term benefits for end users and the organization.

Ready to learn more? Download our e-book and discover the six-step process for making your paperless office a reality.