6 Reasons You Should Digitise Your Company Records, Media and Archives

Converting paper documents, film archives and photographic film media to digital files increases operational efficiency, improves workflow, and enhances customer relationships and public perception of a company. More importantly, digitisation ensures that, should the original media become lost or damaged, their electronic counterparts will remain accessible. Companies working in the medical, financial, and legal fields are particularly vulnerable in this regard.

Here are only a few reasons why going digital makes sense:

1. It will help you cope with emergencies.

By archiving documents and media in an efficient cloud-based storage system, you can prepare your business for any kind of disaster or emergency. It will be much easier to resume business operations after a disaster when essential information remains available online. 

2. It will save you time.

A business that relies only on paper or film documentation loses hours annually in the effort to maintain, locate, and update these items. Additionally, many of those media are only valuable in a specific situation for a few points of data they contain. Therefore, it makes sense to convert them to digital form for as-needed electronic searching, rather than having employees go over large amounts of irrelevant text and data in hopes of finding the exact piece of information they need.

3. It will make compliance easier.

Most businesses face numerous compliance issues.  These regulations may deal with customer privacy, financial accountability, or methods of record-keeping. Companies that lose original paper documents or film media that don’t have electronic back-ups may face serious consequences for non-compliance.

4. It will increase the flexibility of your staffing schedule.

Digitisation provides greater flexibility in staffing, as it permits staff to work remotely. A company can also increase retention when staff members enjoy the flexibility of being able to work from home.  Additionally, digitisation may enable a company to reduce the amount of office space it needs, thus lowering overhead.

5. It will boost your firm’s customer-facing efficiency.

Digitisation can greatly improve a company’s response time in dealing with functions such as customer inquiries, logistical problems, and sales. 

6. It will help you cut costs and maximize your company’s potential.

Digitisation can reduce the amount of paid staff needed to process and handle copies of records. Electronic files also minimize or eliminate the transportation costs of moving documents from place to place, and lessen the amount of time needed to retrieve relevant documents. 

Today, when the corporate environment is rapidly transitioning to digitisation, new possibilities have emerged for gathering and using digitised business data to create new layers of value-added products and services. These can, in turn, increase the range of options available for companies to offer their customers and other stakeholders.