Challenges of a Paperless Office Presentation

Introduction

• Some studies suggest that paper consumption continues to grow unabatedly with severe environmental impacts (Georgesku, Tugui and Dumitriu, 2008).
• The use of paper has created modern business bureaucracy, but paper is also an important instrument for critical business agreements.
• Most offices have excess papers.
• Technologies continue to show that businesses can abandon papers.
• Industry professionals predicted ‘the paperless office’ in 1970s.

Some facts about paper usages?

• An average office person uses 10000 sheets of copy paper every year.
• The USA consumes over 30% of the world’s paper.
• More than 40% of wood pulp is used in paper production.
• It costs the US over $25-35B in filing, storing, and retrieving paper every year.
• On average, people can copy a document up to 9 times.
• Over 5% of paper documents get lost and 7.5% are misfiled.

Challenges of going paperless

• Maintaining a paperless office is expensive.
• Electronic communications require both parties to have relevant software and hardware.
• Most business communications with partners and individual are still paper-based.
• Possible costs and loss of productivity when going paperless.
• Inability to adopt change policies may hinder the process.
• Technological challenges, particularly compatible software, file format, and system stability.
• Lack of appropriate skills to use new technologies for paperless office.
• Some uses of paper will never disappear.

Benefits of paperless office

• Most documents are already in electronic formats.
• It will reduce costs of printing, filing, paper production, shipping.
• It saves the environment.
• Availability of office space for other uses.
• Enhanced staff productivity.
• It saves time on filing, locating, and retrieving paper documents.
• Therefore, employees should adopt paperless office and realize these benefits.

Reference

Georgesku, M., Tugui, A., and Dumitriu, F. (2008). Challenges For The Quality Of Information In The Paperless Office. Web.