Greg Griffith, Product Marketing Manager at Kyocera Document Solutions South Africa.
As organisations return to full operational pace after the December break, the early months of the year often reveal uncomfortable truths about how work gets done. Backlogs resurface, approvals stall and employees spend the first weeks of the year chasing documents, re-entering data and navigating fragmented processes that quietly undermine productivity.
While inefficiency is often accepted as part of “business as usual”, its impact is anything but ordinary. Manual, document-heavy workflows slow decision-making, increase error rates and consume valuable employee time. In a climate where businesses are under pressure to do more with less, these hidden inefficiencies represent a growing operational risk.
“The start of the year is when inefficiency becomes visible,” says Greg Griffith, Product Marketing Manager at Kyocera Document Solutions South Africa. “The combination of pent-up demand, fresh performance targets and limited tolerance for delays exposes where manual processes are no longer fit for purpose.”
Many organisations still rely on paper-based or semi-digital workflows for critical functions such as invoice processing, contract approvals, HR onboarding and compliance documentation. These processes often involve duplicated effort, inconsistent document handling and limited visibility, making them difficult to manage and even harder to optimise.
Kyocera’s approach focuses on transforming documents into usable information from the moment they enter the organisation. Through intelligent capture, workflow automation and structured document management, businesses can remove friction from everyday operations and create clarity where complexity once existed.
Square 9 Softworks, Kyocera’s intelligent document management and workflow automation platform, enables organisations to digitise, classify and route information automatically. When paired with Kyocera’s TASKalfa and ECOSYS multifunction devices, documents can be captured securely at the edge and integrated directly into digital workflows that support faster approvals, better governance and improved accountability.
The result is not simply faster processing, but a more resilient operating model. Employees spend less time managing paperwork and more time focusing on analysis, service delivery and decision-making. Managers gain visibility into bottlenecks and performance, while compliance teams benefit from structured audit trails and controlled access.
As businesses set priorities for the year ahead, many are re-evaluating how much inefficiency they are willing to tolerate. The first quarter presents a natural opportunity to assess whether existing workflows are supporting growth or quietly holding it back.
Kyocera encourages organisations to start the year with a clear view of their document processes. A workflow assessment can help identify where manual handling and disconnected systems are creating unnecessary drag, and where intelligent automation can deliver immediate, measurable improvements.
