Now that you all know the difference between digitisation and digitalisation (well, at least, you better!), we need to dive into the reason why digitisation is the way to go for your business. Here are a few ways digitisation helps your company:
1 - increase efficiency
If technology has taught us anything, it is that we can in fact do things quicker and better. Digitisation plays a big part in getting rid of various bottlenecks and cumbersome processes.
For example, signing a contract takes a whole lot of time.
On the company’s end, HR services need to print, then have it signed by decision makers, and mailed to the appropriate recipient.
On the recipient’s end, well… Two solutions:
- They either sign the paper, and mail it back to the company
- They sign it, scan all the pages, keep a copy of the work contract, and mail a copy.
Clearly, this is headache worthy for anyone who might read these processes.
There is significant room for improvement there, and digitisation is the solution to these awkward and outdated processes. Nowadays, you can use the electronic signature to safely and securely sign any legally binding document. Of course, that’s just one example, but it’s an eloquent one. Thanks to electronic signature, there is no need to spend hours to print out contracts, carry them all over the building for signature, mail them, and wait for the answer. It used to take 15 days to sign a contract, now it only takes 15 minutes.
2- Cut Cost
In a company there are essential spendings - like wages and such - and non essential spendings. Well, believe it or not, unessential spendings have grown even more unessential thanks to digitisation.
Embracing the digital transition mainly means getting rid of paper. By the way, did you know that up to 3% of a company’s revenue is spent on paper according to research firm Gartner? We’re talking about an ocean of copy paper, note paper, invoices, letters, file folders … It’s quite astonishing, especially when you think that 80% of the papers we file, we will never refer to again!
And dare I mention that printers need toners, cartridges and quite naturally, the more you use them, the faster you empty them out which ultimately means… the sooner you’ll have to buy more.
All of these spendings do add up in the end, especially when you think that papers can get lost (it is estimated that 750 paper documents are lost per year). Oh, and guess what ? Finding one single document cost more than $120.
Did I even mention that even storing paper cost money? You see even when paper does nothing, it takes up space, which in the end winds up being costly. Much like a plane sitting on the tarmac, paper sitting in a file cabinet can take up to 2,500 square feet, which on average, adds up to $135,000 annually.
Digitisation can make all these weaknesses fade away, to become evil memories in your assuaged mind.
3- Increase productivity
Productivity is the name of the game nowadays. But it’s difficult to be productive when you keep getting bogged down by menial tasks, or even worse… looking for things you thought you knew the location of. According to The Wall Street Journal (yes, it’s serious stuff), executives spend 6 weeks annually looking for documents they lost.
We could go on and on and on about how a typical employee spends 2 hours a week finding, sharing and storing documents; or even how lost documents alone are said to cost an average mid-size business $91,500. We could but we won’t.
We don’t like to talk about the problem, we would rather talk about the solution. Well, we’ve been talking about the solution this whole time. Digitisation can help increase productivity by simply getting rid of all these unnecessary day-to-day paper-related struggles we all have.
Sure, it only takes a few seconds to find a document, but let’s multiply by X number of employees and it quickly all adds up.
There are a myriad of other ways digitisation can help your business, but we think we have covered the most straightforward and obvious ones. As we’ve seen digitisation is the way to go nowadays for businesses and you can bet your bottom dollar that it still will in the long run!
