Five Good Reasons To Choose EDM Dematerialization Software

Long considered a “nice to have, “EDM (electronic document management) is experiencing a real craze with the acceleration of the digitalization of companies following Covid and the rise of telework. Apart from these trends, EDM has many advantages for the company and its employees. Here are five good reasons to equip yourself with EDM / dematerialization software if your company is not yet equipped.An article by DocuWare, a specialist in EDM and process dematerialization for over 30 years.

Saving Time

Employees spend 20-40% of their time manually searching for documents (Coleman Parkes study). An employee takes an average of 18 minutes to find a document. Time wasted processing paper leads to a 21.3% decrease in productivity (source: IDC). Many employees struggle to complete their day-to-day tasks due to the amount of information they have to process and the inefficient paper-based processes they work with.  

< UNK> Using an EDM and dematerialization solution, such as DocuWare, allows, according to studies observed with its customers, to reduce the time spent looking for a document by 75%. Thanks to the DocuWare full-text search, the document can be found in one click by entering a reference, the supplier’s name, an article code, etc.

Financial Gains

According to Gartner, companies spend 1-3% of their revenue printing documents. Added to this:

1. archiving,
2. sending,
3. and document storage.

Not to mention, of course, the cost of the paper itself. It is also necessary to consider the time devoted to these operations, which prevents employees from devoting themselves to tasks with higher added value. Each year in France, nearly 11 million tonnes of paper are consumed. Each Indian person consumes an average of 167 kg of paper per year.

According to ADEME, an employee consumes an average of 70 to 85 kg of paper annually. Half of the paper consumed in France each year is thus used for work. Paper consumption also has economic repercussions: a company with a hundred employees spends between 10,000 and 25,000 euros annually for internal paper consumption and equipment maintenance.

The reform on mandatory electronic invoicing in 2024 will also significantly reduce paper use by forcing companies to receive and issue invoices electronically. Four million French companies are affected by the reform. The estimated gain amounts to 5 euros per invoice processed.

Compliance With The Regulations And Standards In Force

Mandatory electronic invoicing regulations in 2024 The Financial and Accounting departments of companies will have to comply with the law on compulsory electronic invoicing, starting in 2024, to respect the following schedule:

1. July 1, 2024, in reception, to all taxable persons;
2. July 1, 2024, in transmission, to enormous organizations;
3. January 1, 2025, to medium-sized companies;
4. January 1, 2026, to small and medium-sized enterprises and microenterprises.

The use of an invoice dematerialization solution will then be one of the options for meeting these deadlines. DocuWare, as a Dematerialization Operator (OD), offers this type of service. Dematerialization projects take a long time to implement and involve many people within your company.  The golden rule: do not wait too long and anticipate this reform, which promises to be major for accounting and financial services, as soon as possible.

Compliance With ISO Standards And Management Of Non-Conformities

A document and workflow management solution also has many advantages for the Quality/QHSE departments of companies, in particular in:

1. industry sector,
2. agri-food,
3. or health,

…subject to compliance with numerous standards, particularly the ISO 9001 and ISO 27001 regulations. A GED solution thus makes it possible to:

1. Work more efficiently by centralizing your key documents,
2. Optimize collaborative work with workflows,
3. Manage document versioning,
4. Secure your documents with a GDPR-certified solution and electronic safe (NF 552 and NF 203 standards),
5. Optimize the management of quality processes and iso standards with a view to certification, re-certification, or quality audits.

Respect For Personal Data And The GDPR

Document management solutions such as DocuWare, certified NF552, allow you to comply with the Personal Data Protection Regulations (GDPR) by centralizing your confidential documents and those of your employees within the secure digital cabinet and accessible only to those concerned.

Reinforcement Of Data Security

Acquiring document management software will help protect your documents from viewing by unauthorized persons, hacking, or data theft. Dematerialization is synonymous with absolute traceability and transparency:

1. all actions being analyzed and stored,
2. You keep full control over document versions, changes, and associated processes,
3. You can manage your processes in a dematerialized and automated way using workflows,
4. Your employees, therefore, work faster and more transparently.

Access to documents and workflow information in DocuWare is based on a complex rights structure. Thus, you can choose which employees are authorized to:

1. read,
2. register,
3. to treat,
4. export,
5. edit,
6. or even delete data.

You can therefore organize your work in such a way as to ensure the confidentiality and protection of your documents and data. You can also verify the integrity of your important documents within workflows using legally valid electronic signatures. DocuWare Cloud offers high protection for your documents against ransomware such as ransomware and other malware.

Based on the Microsoft Azure architecture, which recognizes 99% of viruses, any contaminated document is immediately recognized by DocuWare and cannot be archived. If a new virus appeared, it would not be able to spread to other documents in the organization because the malware could not access the corresponding data storage. 

The architecture of DocuWare Cloud guarantees a high level of security against viruses at all times. Finally, DocuWare being certified NF203 on the electronic safe and NF552 on the GDPR guarantees you certified protection for archiving your confidential data.

An Environmental Impact

The eco-attitude is daily attention to limit its ecological impact, starting, in the first place, by abandoning paper. 1kg of paper consumes 2 kg of wood and up to 60 liters of water. Producing a sheet of A4 paper consumes an average of 5 liters of water. Faced with such energy resource consumption, limiting our environmental impact seems crucial.

A company with around 100 employees spends between 10,000 and 25,000 euros each week solely for its internal paper consumption and equipment maintenance (sources: Ademe) In total, useless prints (forgotten, discarded, lost) would represent a cost of 300 million euros (source: Syndicat National des supports d’Image et d’Information). 

Dematerialization is often presented as an advantage from an environmental point of view because it reduces paper consumption; the public figures available since 2016/2017 show this drop: we went from 10.1 million tonnes of paper consumed in 2010 to 8.8 million in 2016 and 8.5 million in 2017. Far behind, we find almost equally the “gain of storage space on servers, applications and mailboxes” at 27% and support for the digital transition (25%).

The part of the program which aims to set up Good Practices for purging servers or our messaging services would make it possible to save energy. As a reminder, 20 emails per day for one year by the same person corresponds to the consumption of a car over 1000 km (Source: SERDA Conseil, digital governance of information 2020).

EDM, A Solution For Adopting An Eco-Responsible Approach

A document management solution is part of the adoption of a CSR approach by reducing or even abandoning the use of paper and associated consumables and allowing the reduction of physical storage space. In addition, a GED solution also promotes teleworking by giving access to documents everywhere, on the move or in the home office. It has been demonstrated that telework reduces greenhouse gas emissions by reducing home-work journeys, equivalent to 271 kg of CO2 saved over one year per day of telework (source: ADEME).

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