There is a common perception among businesses that all you need to go paperless is to scan your documents. While scanning certainly is one of the starting points, you need to take the document digitization process a few steps further. You need to automate business processes in your organization. That’s because unless you stop creating new documents in paper form, you will simply find yourself scanning more documents and then routing their paper versions for review, approval, etc. Scanning will, no doubt, allow your documents to be part of digital workflows, but by itself will not help your office go paperless!
What you need to do is stop creating paper-based documents in the first place and create electronic versions instead (e.g. MS Word files). Also, you can request your business associates to email documents to you instead of sending paper copies. This will ensure that your office has to manage minimal amounts of paper-based documents. This will take care of one part of your organization’s attempts to go paperless. The other part involves using the tool that will actually help you go paperless. And that tool is document management software.