Digitisation: the pros and cons

There’s no escaping it these days. Accelerated by successive lockdowns, digitisation of business processes is all the rage. The advantages of digitisation are numerous. Of course, as with any change, you need to weigh up the pros and cons, but it’s a pretty safe bet that digitising your processes will bring both short- and long-term benefits for your business.

Clearly, before we look at the advantages and disadvantages of digitisation, we need to know exactly what it is!

Digitisation is the process of replacing a physical medium with a digital medium. With “zero-paper” CSR strategies on the rise, paper-based processes will be the biggest casualties of these structural changes to businesses. There are two kinds of digitisation:

• Duplicative: Each paper document has a digital equivalent. 
• Native: The documents have no paper equivalent. They are received directly in digital format.

So, why are digitisation processes so popular at the moment? There must be a reason, right? Well, there are several. Digitisation offers a host of advantages, such as:

• Space savings: The main advantage of digitisation is the way digitised documents are stored.
  No more endless stacks of paper piling up on the corner of your desk! Instead, all these documents are stored in digital format. 
  Some companies use archive rooms, which can contain thousands of documents. Of course, filing all these documents is time-consuming, but it can also be expensive, potentially costing thousands of euros.
• Financial savings: The economic footprint of paper storage is staggering. The cost of all the printing, the reams of paper, the toner, the printers... it all adds up. A Gartner study found that nearly 3% of a company’s annual revenue is spent on paper. Digitising administrative processes can therefore bring considerable savings – up to several thousand euros, depending on your turnover.
• Environmental benefits: More and more companies are polishing their CSR strategies.
• Time savings: Printing, sorting and filing documents can take a lot of time. It’s a tedious task that requires a lot of rigour and focus. In addition, despite all the effort and concentration that goes into filing, finding the document you are looking for can sometimes be slow going. Digitisation means the time and energy devoted to sorting and filing documents can be spent on more important tasks.
• Convenience: Most of the tools we use today are collaborative and replicate all the rituals associated with paper documents.  With remote working having become more prevalent following successive lockdowns, employees have seen new needs for instant, simultaneous communication emerge, needs that digitisation has met very effectively.

As with any structural change, digitisation also brings with it a (small) number of disadvantages that companies must prepare for.

• Some security risks: Digitisation means storing some or all of your documents digitally. As a result, some sensitive data could potentially be compromised. That’s why Yousign stores your documents on secure servers. In terms of record keeping, Yousign archives all evidential records electronically with our partner CDC Arkhinéo. Such files are kept for 10 years in accordance with all legal requirements.

The digitisation of businesses is supported by the French Law of 13 March 2000, which stipulates that electronic documents have the same legal value as paper originals. 

As a digitisation expert, Yousign can help you implement digitisation solutions in your business.
Don’t hesitate to get in touch!