Efficient business processes help your green initiatives

Some businesses hesitate to use electronic document management due to their attachment to hard-copies. But having a culture that's addicted to paper breeds costs and waste: Employees may be printing single-sided or printing every job in color. You may not know who’s printing what and when. And your IT staff may be spending too much time on device management and maintenance.

Having the right technology in place makes it easier to let go of the paper. For example, Managed Document Services (MDS) alleviate inefficiencies, eliminate wasted paper, bring improvement to those areas that matter most — and relieve you from the burden of managing printing and other document tasks. MDS provides the right information at the right time in the right form, and it gives you a single point of control to oversee and manage output:

 

• Authenticate users, so they can only print what’s necessary.
• View printers, IP addresses and status alerts.
• Direct print to the most cost-effective devices.
• Default to black-and-white printing.
• Generate reports and compare performance to service level agreements (SLAs).
• Gather data about utilization, usage patterns and more.

With MDS, you have the optimal information infrastructure for your document-related processes. Electronic documents are faster, more accurate, can be delivered automatically and won’t be lost or damaged. That, coupled with materials savings, can trim costs significantly.

For most organizations, there is a growing need to automate archaic document workflows that are paper based and have evolved to be part of their culture. Despite all the technology available, document-intensive, paper-centric workflows remain –— and manual paper trails are often riddled with errors and delays.

If your workplace is filled with folders packed with paper that is shuffled from person to person, it’s highly likely you have an opportunity to automate workflows and eliminate paper. Workflow automation can help simplify many common manual processes you perform every day.

In concrete terms, workflow optimization means taking a common repeatable process and automating it to make it more efficient. With the right workflows in place, there are no excess copies of documentation for files, files are routed electronically rather than making hard copies, and employees don’t have to walk files to coworkers.

With workflow automation, you can: