We’ve come to a point now where we’ve finally realised that our abundant paper usage is not only environmentally detrimental, but also quite frankly superfluous and irrational.
We’re now living through times, where in retail, shops are asking for our email addresses for our digital receipts. So why should our offices and ‘back of house’ environments be any different?
If it doesn’t take the environment’s rapid destruction to spur you into a paper-less future, then maybe the financial benefits will do the talking instead.
The office, aka the birthplace and home of bureaucracy, is renowned for its links to the cumbersome activity of ‘paperwork’.
It has always been a place that we associate with filing cabinets and storage systems for hundreds of paper archives, accounts, references, employee documents — the list is endless.
But in a digital age, this should no longer be the case. As the economic climate is becoming more and more uncertain, businesses should be looking for the easiest possible ways to reduce internal costs to increase ROIs, and paper-cutting is the most obvious, but also most overlooked way of achieving this.
It’s been estimated that over half of all businesses’ office waste is paper, despite the high-end, affordable digital instruments to combat this being in place since the 1970s.
So what are the financial returns for businesses going paperless? Well according to research done by AIIM…
- 28% of paperless businesses achieved full ROI in less than 6 months
- 59% of paperless businesses achieved full ROI in less than 12 months
- 84% of paperless businesses received full payback in less than 18 months
So the easiest answer for going paperless? It’s simple— electronic notebook software. Not only are electronic databases and drives undoubtedly more efficient in terms time and space, but the cost of reducing your paper load down to one electronic lab notebook, like those on offer from IDBS are tenfold.
The electronic notebook serves to adapt and grow with the amount of users and data that your business produces, and encourages collaborative engagement between colleagues on the same piece of work.
With the rise of offices using Google Documents (as opposed to the static Microsoft Word), to edit and collaborate on in real time to breach distance for effective communication , the need for paper has completely vanished.
