According to data provided by EAD Digital, the most important player on the Portuguese digital archiving market, also present in Romania, companies that choose to transform their physical documents into cloud accessible e-documents can reduce their costs with more than 20%.
The local industry increased significantly last year in the context of the coronavirus pandemic and the new trend of work from home. Thus, business processes involving papers have been adjusted or updated, and the concept of “paperless company” has become familiar in the Romanian business environment.
”Digital archiving has three main types of efficiency benefits: company workflows, allocated human resources, and costs related to physical archive storage spaces. For example, a company that has been on the market for more than 10 years, with 50 employees managing an average volume of 400-500 files, must allocate at least 10 cabinets or even a separate physical archive room, and most of the employees will certainly also have tasks like searching in or scanning paper documents. Usually the employees to whom these responsibilities are delegated are from the accounting, human resources or administrative departments, and these tasks are almost without exception preventing them from being effective in their day-to-day work. The use of professional physical and electronic archiving services, plus the use of a document management software completely eliminates the time allocated to these complementary activities, provides immediate access to any company document and significantly increases the speed of work”, explains Bruno Amaro, CEO of EAD Digital Romania.
In some industries, such as telecom, energy or banking services, companies with a high volume of contracts and invoices need a relatively large number of employees exclusively for the processing of those documents. When contracting a digital archiving service, companies will no longer need to hire additional staff for this type of activity.
Companies that decide to digitize their archives invest from several thousand to hundreds of thousands of euros, depending on the specifics and size of the company, to achieve benefits related to business efficiency by reallocating human resources for valuable tasks, streamlining costs with repetitive and time-consuming tasks, and reducing storage-related costs.
“The digital archive also involves reducing of storage spaces, as the company no longer has to keep significant amounts of files for a long term, sometimes for decades, under special conditions. As a result, the costs of deposits, but also those arising from the possible degradation of documents, decrease”, adds Bruno Amaro, CEO of EAD Digital Romania.
A company’s digital archive can contain from documents used by the human resources department (employment contracts) to documents used by the commercial department (invoices, contracts). All documents are scanned and archived in a secure cloud and can be accessed at any time by any company employee, who only needs a live Internet connection to connect to the cloud, in this way having access from anywhere in the world to the entire archive.
“Each employee is allowed to view only those documents related to the department in which they work. Specifically, a Human Resources employee can only see employment contracts, while a Commercial employee will only have access to invoices and contracts with customers. With the help of specific functions in our document management application, the managers can see at any time the activity of each employee, the time spent in the application, the documents viewed, downloaded or distributed”, explains Liviu Zamfir, Chief Operation Manager EAD Digital Romania and one of the Romanian experts in archive management.
In the context of most employees working from home, the digital archiving provider can take over all daily mail and scan it, thus functioning as a digital mail room for its client. The company’s customers and suppliers receive the mail address of the digital archiving provider for the transmission of documents in physical format.
