You’re tired of hearing it. Your employees keep complaining—for years now—that they could really do something special with a few modern changes around the office. They’re ready, they say, to move out the filing cabinets that anchor the 1970s carpet like a Mad Men set. They want to upgrade to a paperless workflow where digital files float in the clouds protected by walls of fire. They want to ditch the care-free plastic plants, and add high-maintenance greenery. They want to downsize the office footprint and get onboard with the eco-movement. They want to use their phones to fax things and share PDFs in place of printing. They want to toss all the machines you’ve amortized and dusted and cherished since you first opened your doors to the curb like so much rubbish.

But to all of that hogwash, you say no. 

And with good reason! You’re no trendy fad follower who falls for newfangled futuristic folly! You’re methodical and practical. Calculated and certain. A steadfast bastion against change! And you think this race to automation, robots, workflows, and outsourcing sounds cold, characterless, and expensive. 

Mostly expensive. 

Well, we hear you, old friend in arms! And to hush the buzzing crowd, we’ve gathered arguments stacked against digitization. A contrarian edifice upon which to declare your pro-paper partisanship. So the next time your employees press you to cast off the tried and true ways of your fathers and forebears for fancy electronic anti-gadgets and upgrades, print off this list and hand it to them: 

The Top 6 Reasons Why A Digital Document Management System Is Ill-advised Hoopla And Money-wasting Malarkey: 

#1: Nearness is dearness

When your paper documents are neatly tucked in an alphabetized folder, color-coded, and carefully filed in a polished-to-a-high-gloss mahogany cabinet behind you (or in your left bottom desk drawer, or in the bankers box under your desk, or in that stack of unfiled sheets on the plant stand by the window), they’re within reach. Physically right there. Literally grabbable in a heartbeat.

Mostly. Most of the time. (Okay, some of the time… unless you’re Ron from accounting, in which case it’s more like none of the time—but he’s a moron and everybody knows it.)

Even those older files that go in the “older files” room between the bathroom and the repurposed smoking room aka photocopy room are reachable. Well, there’s some digging to do, sure. But still, closer than the cloud, which is miles away. In fact, the storage building that holds the archives we still sometimes need is closer than wherever the heck the cloud actually is—but wherever it is, it’s monitored by The Man and you’re sure of that. 

The storage unit isn’t monitored by The Man. It’s monitored by Melvin, who’s lived here in this town for 67 years and keeps hundreds and hundreds of square feet of our proprietary information near us on a local street where we live and work and play—God Bless America! We support Melvin’s local business with our rent payments. And if we need more space, that’s more money in the pocket of our fellow local business owners. There’s a degree of pride in that not worth giving up for anything.

And besides, going to the storage place means coffee and doughnuts on the way back for your hard-working comrades. Coffee and doughnuts, the cozy crispness of paper, the satisfying scratch of a pen across its surface, the backdrop of a dusty off-color plant overlooking your penmanship under the green buzzing glow of 35-year-old fluorescent tubes—tearing up!—that’s America right there.

So phooey #1 on replacing tried and true with new and untouchable and, for all we know, offshore and monitored. And let’s not forget, it’s likely expensive. 

#2: Cleanliness is godliness

Honey, you don’t need software to manage your emails. Next, you’ll need software to manage that software. And software to manage the software that manages the software. It’s an endless mountain of excuses that turns attention away from the real problem: facing your inbox. What you need is a good old fashioned inbox cleaning. Take the time to sort through all 1.2 million emails, tag them with color labels, group them by year, and create meaningful folders within those annual folders that respect your communications so you can search them forever. You’re the one who wanted digital in the first place. So show us all how much better digital folders are than paper folders. Start with email. Sure a document management system could do that for you, but then... where’s the lesson in that? Roll up your sleeves and show us your stick-to-it-ivness, your spit, your grit! A dishwasher could wash your dishes for you, but what self-respecting homeowner ever depended on an energy-guzzling contraption to keep their dishes in order? 

Case in point. 

#3: Patience is a virtue

What’s with attention spans these days? Apparently human beings have not passed down and guarded the virtue of patience. Our ability to wait on the information we’re after has shrunk to 3 seconds. We all used to wait in lines for days, uphill, in a snowstorm, to get the information we needed. And we were grateful for it when we got it with a “thank ya, ma’am” and a howdy-do. Customer service is important, we certainly agree with that. Treat your customers well and they’ll become ambassadors of your brand. But you know what else we agree with more? Respect. If a customer can’t wait for a follow-up call because we don’t know exactly where we put their file at the jump of a hat, well then, maybe we don’t want those customers to ambassador our brand anyway. We built our business on friendliness and thoughtfulness, not immediacy and click-of-a-button servitude. We’ll get back to the customers who appreciate that they’ll hear from us, right after we send out an email and a few faxes to track down what they’re after. Probably today or tomorrow. Or next week. They can wait.  

#4: Structure stifles

Michael J. Gelb once said that confusion is the welcome mat at the door of creativity. We agree! Take away the warmth of stuff, the beauty of randomness, and all you’re left with is automated efficiency stripped of uncertainty. But you feel it in your bones that in the uncertainty, the chaos of yesteryear, there are gems glowing under the stacks just waiting to be discovered. Years of historic knowledge waiting for happenstance to uncover them. But then, in comes digitization and the coziness of familiarity is taken away. The stacks are shredded. When your files become digital, you’re left with a lamp on your desk and that pottery ashtray you repurposed as a pen holder. Only, it’s empty now because you’ve taken away the medium that gave all those pens purpose. Originality and room to breathe is replaced with super-efficiency and cold-to-the-touch file permissions that regulate who can work on what thing at what time. Your day becomes stable, stale, and autobotized. Your career-long system is bulldozed, replaced by electronic routing that takes what you’re working on and watches it from the moment you create it, just waiting to notify others when you’re done with it so they can grab it and change what you made. That’s cruel if you ask us. Singular pride of ownership supplanted by group productivity, records management policies, and robotic procedures. It’ll be a sad day when efficiency wins out over creativity. A sad day, people.   

#5: Trees grow back 

They say photocopiers are mean to the environment. They also say that sharing is caring. So which is it? Are you telling me you can only show you care if you do it without using paper? Are trees really more important than kindness? My former boss bought that photocopier and we’ve depended on it for decades to keep us on track in our weekly board meetings. If that goes, what’s next? No more face to face board meetings?! Will we all just work from home and shout at each other through a video screen? Because the last time I looked, trees grow back. Lumberjacks need to make a living too. Or are we going to outsource that next? Will trees cut themselves down in the future? That’s crazy talk right there. 

#6: Don’t borrow trouble

Maybe if we were a medical facility in the healthcare industry, or a mortgage company, or a law firm, maybe then we would need a paperless workflow to keep track of our dealings. But, thankfully, we’re not in an unkind industry like that. So we don’t need to worry about any of that stuff. It’s not like we could be sued over something silly an employee put down in an email once upon a time (probably filed neatly in a painstakingly-organized annual inbox folder). And if that email isn’t easy to find, well, then the lawyers will have as much trouble finding the alleged article in question as we do. Chances are, those kinds of things only happen to folks in the fancy pants fields. But we’re homegrown and honest. We probably printed a copy of that somewhere and we’ll find it eventually and share it with whoever pointed a faulty finger in our direction. But until that day, we don’t borrow trouble around here. 

Just Kidding; You Need A Paperless Workflow.

So we had a little fun creating a list that works against common sense. The truth is it’s more expensive to run on paper than it is to go paperless because of the costs associated with productivity bottlenecks (wasted time searching for paper documents) and printing expenses.

SMBs in the United States and Western Europe spend $40 billion annually on office equipment and related print services—Xerox

Apart from reducing carbon in the environment, the benefits of digital transformation are too many to ignore (especially since remote work is the new standard):

• The prevalence of smartphones puts what we need to do our jobs at our fingertips wherever we happen to be. But not if what we need is trapped on paper somewhere we aren’t.

• The cloud isn’t miles away as we joked about above. It’s on our phones, our tablets, and our laptops. And those devices are closer than a stack of sheets on a desk in a physical office or storage facility.

• Workflows automate manual data entry tasks, streamline the document process (create-update-share-store), set permissions, flag errors, and send alerts so skilled employees don’t get bogged down with tedious, repetitive tasks and can focus on higher-level work (where it counts to drive your business forward).

But there’s a difference between wanting to go paperless and taking steps to actually go paperless. American companies surveyed in 2017 (before the remote work model explosion) stated that 50% of time wasted was directly linked to paper which impacted their bottom line 60% of the time. Gartner estimates that as much as 50% of help desk calls are printer-related. That’s a lot of time wasted on a phone about a machine you no longer need. 

Businesses waste 14% of their revenue on document and print-related inefficiencies. Just imagine what those teams could accomplish with 14% of their revenue back.

But knowing where to start is overwhelming for established businesses, not to mention the internal C-Level hurdles companies must overcome to begin. Kickstarting a successful digital transformation for your team starts with intention. From intention, a phone call with Revolution Data Systems (RDS) is a great way to answer a ton of questions in a short amount of time. Next, figure out your budget logistics to add tactical scanning markers to your overall paperless strategy. And we begin. Simple as that! You’re on your way to a paperless workflow and a document management system to manage it. 

We’re making the world a better place—that’s right, we’re awesome! RDS pulls forward-thinking companies in and around Louisiana into 2021, getting them set up with automated workflows that give them back time, minimize daily frustrations, and make them competitive again—while saving the planet. Can we get a fist bump right there? Call RDS today. We’re friendly folks and we can’t wait to talk about your journey to paperless.