Today we released a new industry watch research paper, titled “The Paper Free Office - Dream or Reality.” The research finds that removing paper from business continues to be challenging, despite data that shows significant responsiveness and productivity gains in customer service when paper-based bottlenecks are eliminated from business processes.
Speed of response times are also realized by employees working remotely in the field or home offices when the ability to share and search is improved by using digitized content. According to Doug Miles, director of market intelligence at AIIM, “The earlier in the process that capture takes place, the better the transparency and availability the content will have. The data is available to the process faster, and paper forms handling is eliminated.”
Key findings of the research conducted between November 2011 and January 2012 show:
- Paper is beginning to disappear, with 35 percent of respondents confirmed less paper consumption and photocopying.
- 42 percent of scanning and capture projects achieved a payback period of 12 months or less, while 57 percent of projects achieved payback in 18 months or less.
- Mobile and cloud services for scanning and capture are finding early adopters in the enterprise.
- 38 percent of respondents are equipping employees with portable capture devices when not in the office, including portable scanners, smart phones and tablets.
- 20 percent of the largest organizations are committed to a cloud deployment strategy for capture.
- Scanning and capture can seriously improve customer response times - typically between 2 and 3 times faster, but in many cases 5 and 10 times faster.
Despite significant benefits realized by paper-free organizations, some poor habits persist:
- 77 percent of invoices that arrive as PDF attachments are printed, while 31percent of fax invoices are printed and then re-scanned.
- 45 percent of documents that are scanned were completely “born digital”.
- 32 percent of organizations reported an increase in the level of paper consumption and copying.
The full report, “The Paper Free Office - Dream or Reality” can be downloaded from the AIIM web site at http://www.aiim.org/Research/Industry-Watch/Paper-Free-Capture-2012. If you need more detail, please contact Doug or me or our press contact, Laurinda Hoffman and McKenzie Worldwide ( or ).
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This research has been underwritten by: ABBYY, EMC, IBM, Kofax, and Swiss Post. Here is a bit of background on AIIM and on the sponsors of the report...
About AIIM
AIIM has been an advocate and supporter of information professionals for nearly 70 years. The association’s mission is to ensure that information professionals understand the current and future challenges of managing information assets in an era of social, mobile, cloud and big data. Founded in 1943, AIIM builds on a strong heritage of research and member service. Today, AIIM is a global, non-profit organization that provides independent research, education and certification programs to information professionals. AIIM represents the entire information management community, with programs and content for practitioners, technology suppliers, integrators and consultants.
About ABBYY
ABBYY ® is a leading provider of document recognition, document capture, and linguistic technologies. The key areas of ABBYY's research and development include document recognition technologies and applied linguistics. Paper-intensive organizations from all over the world use ABBYY solutions to automate time- and labor-consuming tasks and to streamline business processes. www.abbyy.com.
About EMC
EMC Corporation is a global leader in enabling businesses and service providers to transform their operations and deliver IT as a service. Fundamental to this transformation is cloud computing. Through innovative products and services, EMC accelerates the journey to cloud computing, helping IT departments to store, manage, protect, and analyze their most valuable asset—information—in a more agile, trusted, and cost-efficient way. www.EMC.com.
About IBM Enterprise Content Management
IBM Enterprise Content Management solutions enable the world’s top companies to make better decisions, faster. As a market leader in content, process and compliance software, IBM ECM delivers a broad set of mission-critical solutions that help solve today’s most difficult business challenges: managing unstructured content, optimizing business processes and helping satisfy complex compliance requirements through an integrated information infrastructure. www.ibm.com/software/data/ecm.
About Kofax
Kofax plc is the leading provider of capture driven process automation solutions. Kofax solutions provide a rapid return on investment by automating information intensive processes and by managing the capture of information in a more accurate, timely and cost-effective manner. Visit www.kofax.com.
About Swiss Post
Swiss Post Solutions (SPS), a division of Swiss Post, offers a comprehensive range of document and business process outsourcing services. With 7000 people working across Europe, North America and Asia and with access to an extensive partner network, SPS is able to provide its clients with on, near or off-shore document capture and processing options for automating business processes. Visit www.swisspostsolutions.com.
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