A Paperless office – fact or fiction?

Many people believe that a paperless office is impossible due to the fact that paper documents still play an indispensable role. This is especially true in the healthcare industry. Paper forms and documents flow through businesses everyday and in every department.


Paper is exchanging hands, passing through in-boxes and out- boxes, being copied, placed in folders, and ultimately ending up in a file cabinet as a permanent record. In spite of its popularity, paper has a variety of disadvantages and inconveniences in the office environment. Let’s look at some shocking paper statistics to have a deeper insight into this problem: 

• The average office worker continues to use a staggering 10,000 sheets of copy paper every year.

• In the U.S., companies spend more than $120 billion a year on printed forms, most of which outdate themselves within three months’ time.

• A typical employee spends 30-40% of his time looking for information locked in email and filing cabinets – filing costs average about $20 per month.

• Each misfiled document costs $125. Each lost document cost $350 to $700 – large organizations lose a document every 12 seconds.

Obviously, using too much paper is causing your company to waste a great deal of money and time, as well as reduced productivity. So is the paperless office really just a dream? How do you reduce paper consumption? How can you find the right way to bring your companies nearer to paperless office? Here are 3 key strategies:

1. Discourage paper usage.

Using existing technology, track the number of paper sheets printed by each person. By generating a monthly report and emailing it to everyone within your company, you can control and minimize the amount of paper usage. Your company could carry out the ‘carrot or stick approach’ complimenting the ones who fulfill the quotas and discourage the ones who faultier.

2. Utilize OCR

Optical character recognition (OCR) software turns PDF files created by hardware scanners into editable files that are considerably more useful. Using advanced document capture solution like iCapture or  SharePoint OCR, any organization can convert their scanned documents to PDF, and also extract key information and data from documents for later use instead of printing out and keeping them in file cabinets.

3. Develop workflow.

Moving forward, develop workflows to digitalize more types of paper insuring that being paperless becomes a habit you keep. A digital workflow allows you to streamline business processes and route documents throughout the organization, not to mention that you can review and search a specific document or file whenever you need. To this end, some versatile tools like iCapture or iWorkflow could be your right choice. 

Perhaps the brief facts and solutions presented above could change your belief in a paperless office. Follow us if you would like to continue discovering the paperless world.