According to Ricoh’s recent ‘Process Efficiency Index’, European organisations are investing around €147 billion per year on managing critical business document processes, which equates to almost 362 million hours of employee time per year.
The study found existing processes to be needlessly labour-intensive and prone to error, with only 22% of businesses having a fully automated process in place to manage important documents and an average of 42% of all business-critical information still in hard-copy format. These figures leave significant scope for organisations to replace the time spent manually processing information with solutions that add significant value to the bottom line.
When asked to consider the impact of optimisation on existing processes, research participants estimated a possible 5% increase in profitability, equating to approximately €46 billion in profits as a result. By reforming the management of critical document processing, businesses have a real opportunity to improve business competitiveness and maximise employee effectiveness.
Many of these critical documents will, of course, be related to accounts payable, such as invoices, purchase orders, GRNs and so on. The PaletteArena suite offers organisations a more efficient automated alternative to paper-based manual systems, reducing the amount of time that AP staff spend on administrative tasks and improving the visibility of invoice-related processes through the organisation.
Read more http://thoughtleadership.ricoh-europe.com/managing-costs-document-processes-europe)