Going paperless
Paper is everywhere and many businesses spend a lot of time and money moving paper around as it would seem that old habits die hard and the paperless office is one of those lagging paradigm shifts.
However, much of what we do here at Foxmere, including our core business model, is in the interest of promoting sustainability. Therefore, it was simply a matter of time before we converted our traditional admin system to a modern paperless system.
The first steps involved getting those involved with company paperwork on board and collectively coming up with a system that was easy to understand whilst being functional and scalable.
It was decided that we would need to make a series of changes to our bespoke CRM whilst also harnessing the power of a popular cloud storage platform like Dropbox, Google Drive or Microsoft OneDrive.
That was the easy bit.
Once the system was agreed upon, we proceeded to backdate years' worth of paperwork from across three departments into our new, comprehensively organised, digital system.
This meant a lot of scanning and a lot of shredding.
Along the way, we also made a few system-based revisions as some of our earlier ideas didn't perform quite how we expected them to and, six months later, we were paperless.
It was a tedious process, to say the least, but it was worth every minute.
Not only do we now save money on paper and ink, we have more physical space and a lower carbon footprint. Other benefits for going paperless include:
- Making documents easier to sort and search, saving time and money
- Reducing time spent on editing and redistributing documents
- Reducing the chances of documents getting lost
- Effortless disaster recovery
However, despite our best efforts to go 100% paperless, this doesn't mean we can get rid of the printers just yet...
You see, as other companies and governmental organisations are still playing catch-up, we still need to print the occasional document and sign it in blue ink for legal purposes.
However, this is a relatively rare occurrence and because all of our paper is responsibly sourced, shredded and recycled, we're comfortable that our efforts are still doing wonders for the environment with the hope that our partners and peers follow suit in the near future.
If you want to learn more about what we do to help the environment and promote sustainability or if you simply want to know more about increasing the total lifetime value of your automation please get in touch.
