Ever watch a TV show or movie from the 80s or 90s and get blown away by the offices and workplaces you see? The hair! The clothes! The constant smoking! It’s like a totally different world.
But there’s one thing we see in these ancient offices that makes us cringe every single time. No, not secretaries with huge shoulder pads smoking a cigarette at their desks. We’re talking the stacks and stacks of papers. Because here at Array, we think physical paperwork should definitely be a thing of the past.
Here are five great reasons why:
Reason One: It’s Expensive
US companies spend over $120 billion each year printing forms. That’s more money spent on printing paperwork than we spend on training ($87bn). And given the choice between printing forms on paper and upskilling our workforce, we know what we’d rather do.
Even worse, companies who haven’t made the switch to digital platforms increase this spend year on year. So if you’re spending thousands on physical paperwork in 2020, imagine how much you could be spending in 2021.
You could increase that figure by 10, 15, even 20%. Or you could slash it by switching to a digital form system like Array.
Reason Two: It&rsquo ;s Expensive in Terms of Work Hours
There’s more to costs than printer ink and stacks of paper. You’re also paying people to handle this paper work. They’re spending hours and hours printing forms, collecting forms, distributing forms, and moving forms from one part of the office to another.
In fact, there’s a trick that lazy workers the world over know. “If you want to look busy, make sure you’re carrying a stack of papers.”
Hours and hours of every single staff member’s time wasted moving paper around.
Or hours saved by cutting out printing entirely and distributing digitally. You can’t pretend to be busy when Array’s automatically distributed your forms to every single field agent in a fraction of a second.
Reason Three: It’s Difficult to Protect
How seriously do you take data protection? When everything’s handled digitally, it’s much easier. You can use passwords, secure servers, firewalls, remotely controlled permissions - a whole suite of tools to keep data and information safe.
But when you do things with physical paperwork, your options are limited and much more expensive. Your disaster recovery involves making expensive copies and paying for offsite storage. Your on-site security is a filing cabinet that can be forced open far more easily than you’d like to think.
And when people are using those forms, when they’re out on desks and tables - they’re not secure at all.
If you’re serious about security, you need to get serious about digital.
Reason Four: It’s Difficult to Share
Picture this. You’ve got a field agent out in rural Arizona. He’s carried out his tasks, he’s ticked everything off his checklist, and now for compliance and productivity reasons, he needs to get that completed checklist back to your branch office a few hundred miles away.
What are his options?
- He can use the postal service. Expensive and unreliable, and won’t reach you for days.
- He can drive it to you himself. He’s not working while he’s driving.
- He can fax it over to you. If he’s got a fax machine. And who has a fax machine in 2020?
- Or he could try and take a picture using the camera on his cell, then attach that to an email, and hope what you end up with is readable.
Or he can complete his checklist on Array and it’ll be sent to you immediately, with no extra steps.
One of those options looks far, far simpler to us.
Reason Five: It’s Difficult to Customize
OK, here’s the big one. Just think about a form that your field agents use every day. Could be a compliance checklist, a customer research form, anything. Now imagine the steps you need to take to add just one more item to that checklist for every one of your operatives.
You’ve got to change the form, print it however many hundreds of times, distribute those copies to the people in your office.
Then it’s got to go to another regional HQ where they’ve got to print it and distribute it. Rinse and repeat for all your regional offices...
And then all those forms need to come back and all those difficulties we’ve already mentioned come back into play.
Or you log into your Array dashboard, add a new form field, and go and do something else productive while Array distributes it to every single user who needs it. No emails, no printing, no phone calls to chase up whether it’s been done. It’s just done.
Why would you want to do it any differently?
See How Easy it is to Replace Paper - for Free!
If you want to say goodbye to expensive, time-consuming paperwork and start working digitally, we’re here and ready to help. Just try Array for yourself - for free - and if it saves you time and money we’ll help you use Array for all of your data collection tasks.