Given the surge in cloud adoption and mobile devices in the workplace, it’s easy to underestimate how much we still communicate on paper. Think back to the last time you visited an emergency room or a doctor’s office. How much paper did you handle? How much was stacked behind the nurses’ station?
All that data has to go from its unstructured form to data that is storable, retrievable and sortable. I’ve run out of –ables, but you take my point. Organizations are dealing with ever increasing streams of data. With that date comes a greater need to manage it.
So, back to paper. You may never fully do away with it, but you do need a strategy to manage it. However, unless your company is in the business of data management and imaging, you don’t have to be the architect or frontline manager of that strategy.
In a recent discussion, David Maurice, regional sales director of Dell Print Solutions, emphasized the importance of considering the flow of paper in and out of an org.
“Almost every CIO is faced with challenges around bandwidth. And with tech-support trouble tickets, 20-50% are associated with printer related calls,” Maurice noted.
Research done by Perceptive Software, Maurice said, indicates that “80% of information that institutions and corporations are required to manage is not in their ERP systems. Much of it is still on paper.”
Maurice said that Dell can assist customers with document management strategies that move them away from inefficient legacy processes to an automated, standardized process. The time and money saved can then be reinvested in innovation, he said.
In citing some Dell customer stories, Maurice mentioned that Dell’s cloud-based solution allowed one customer to scale back from three data centers to two.
Imaging is an obvious tool for document management, he said, but there are key issues, like storage and security, to be considered. As he pointed out, “You’re capturing that information and it needs to go somewhere.”
Dell’s security acquisitions may not be top-of-mind when you consider a vendor for document management, but Maurice says it should be.
Part of the benefit of working with Dell is that as an information technology company with a serious focus on security, security mechanisms are embedded into the design and function of the solutions.
“Dell understands the need to maintain security at the device and beyond,” Maurice said.
If you’d like to explore solutions for document data management, feel free to request a consultation with a printer solutions expert on Dell.com.