Since the first Labor Day celebrations in 1882, we’ve been reminded annually that the productivity of American workers fuels our country’s economic growth. As our economic base continues to shift to information-based industries, electronic content management tools, such as document scanning and eforms, are helping the American worker become even more productive.
Before we discuss the ways document management systems improve efficiency, let’s take a look at one facet that hampers productivity in the workplace. Efficiency studies1 reveal that office workers spend 40-50 percent of their time looking for information and 18 minutes searching for a document. That translates into $14,000 worth of productivity lost per worker per year due to an employee’s inability to find the data they require to do their job!2
Key business processes requiring rapid and accurate transfer of information, i.e. accounts payable, customer service and credit approvals, can sap the American worker of the ability to produce if locked into paper-based systems. On the other hand, workers become less stressed, more efficient and more productive when given such tools as workflow automation, eforms and robust document scanning and document management systems to maximize their efforts.
What Form Should the Future Take?
Here’s another interesting fact: eighty-five percent of business processes depend on forms1, which means there’s no better way to improve productivity than to reduce the time it takes to create, distribute, complete and integrate forms into a company’s operations. Streamlining key business processes with electronic forms allows workers to capture data automatically, initiate an automated workflow, upload data to line-of-business applications, such as human resources or accounting, and store the eform for easy future retrieval.
