Johannesburg, 10 Mar 2011
South African companies waste time and effort managing vast amounts of paper documentation; yet the paperless office will remain more fiction than fact for a long time to come.
This is the view of Thomas Senger, Kofax senior VP of applications software sales, EMEA.
Senger will present at the Document Capture and Process Forum on 7 April at the Southern Sun in Montecasino. The conference will be hosted by document management solutions provider Kofax, in partnership with its platinum partner Intervate and ITWeb.
According to Senger, resistance by corporates to change is inhibiting initiatives to reduce paper usage in organisations.
He points out most multifunction devices, printers and document capturing devices are underutilised by companies.
Senger says organisations striving to go paperless are doing so in order to reduce costs, boost efficiency and automation, while going green is simply viewed as an additional benefit.
“Digitising content is not only about reducing the amount of paper, but it's also about improving efficiency and having information at the right place and at the right time,” notes Senger.
He says government, financial services and telecoms are the sectors which can benefit from reduced paper and manual processes.
“Government and financial are the most paper-intensive sectors, but any industry can benefit [from document capture solutions]. If you look at transportation services such as DHL or Federal Express, the customer has to sign a receipt to receive a package, and now with smart metering a lot of paper work is removed.”
According to Senger, businesses in emerging countries like SA are at an advantage because they can leapfrog technology stages and go straight from their legacy systems to the latest document management technology.
Senger adds there are more risks involved in having too many paper-intensive processes than there are having digitised documents.
“Paper documents can be lost or wrongly allocated, and the consequence of this is missed business opportunities, financial damage, compliance issues or a document not available on time.”
The Document Capture and Process Forum will see local and international experts presenting on how digitising documents provides measurable business benefits.
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