Relying on paper documents for the day-to-day operation of your business is not only inefficient, it may open your business up to all manner of liabilities should a disaster strike. It’s a fact that 40% of businesses affected by natural disasters never reopen. Any business professional who has survived one of these horrendous events will tell you that disaster recovery and records restoration is always going to be more expensive than disaster planning. It’s always better to anticipate than to react. Basing your business on something as volatile as paper documents in this digital age will eventually come with a price tag. Fortunately, document imaging can not only remove this hazardous practice, it can make your business even more productive. If you don’t have to have employees dedicated to retrieving and filing paper documents all day, those individuals can be repurposed in an area where they can offer you some real ROI.
Electronic content management, or ECM, is the solution to lost, damaged, or misfiled documents, and as a bonus, it can create an electronic trail for each document and can control access to those documents as a security feature. Another advantage to ECM is immediately obvious when you look around your business and realize how many precious square feet of space are occupied by file cabinets. Chances are that you can put that space to much more profitable use after all of your documents have been converted to electronic files and stored either on a server or secured in the cloud.
Nobody expects you to just go out, buy a scanner and some database management software and start digitizing your documents. That would be a waste of resources, especially when there are companies who specialize in converting paper document into electronic files, organizing them, and setting up storage solutions. Consulting with these experts will open your eyes to the affordable possibilities being offered in ECM. Savings, enhanced document security, increased efficiency when retrieving a requested document, and the ability to recover virtually all of your documents in the event of a disaster are all great reasons to make a phone call today and see what you can accomplish in the digital age.
