The drive towards the digital office has never been greater due to lockdown restrictions and the need for home working. Multiple surveys have demonstrated that the vast majority of employees do not want to go back into the office full-time and that a hybrid working environment is preferable. Whatever happens, COVID-19 will have changed the working environment forever.
What does this mean for scanning and document management companies? Is the move towards a digital office and the cloud the beginning of the end for the traditional paper archiving business or does it present an opportunity to capitalise on the changing environment? Around 90% of scanning and document management companies already offer some form of online or cloud-based electronic document management system (DMS). There is a tendency for scanning and document management companies, once they have a selected a DMS, to tick the cloud box and continue focussing on the traditional business at hand. But are they missing a trick?
Most DMS’s target large enterprises and are feature rich encompassing workflow management, email integration, and application programming interfaces (APIs) to almost any mainstream IT system whether that is SAP, Google Drive or OneDrive. However, for many organisations and particularly SMEs, much of this functionality is not needed. Many of these companies just want to quickly and efficiently find their scanned archived documents and don’t want to use or pay for solutions with workflows and multiple API options.
As we move further towards digitisation, scanning and document management companies should offer a variety of cloud-based solutions to meet the needs of all clients and not just offer a DMS which is more suited to larger enterprises.