One of my LinkedIn Connections, an old high school friend, works for one of the largest printer manufacturers in the world. And she posts quite frequently on the developments going on in that space. Those developments are great looking at it from a purely technical perspective. We can print from mobile devices, print from the Cloud, print from space, in full color, double sided, in bulk, parallel, secure, fast, reliable.
In 1989 I started my own little accountant business, doing the bookkeeping for some small entrepreneurs. On a PC. Paperless. I used a black and white hand scanner to scan the invoices, receipts and bank statements, and then gave the shoebox back to my customer. Yes, I had some trouble with Tax authorities, it took them some 15 years to allow me to digitally do my stuff. In 1993 I worked for a company that printed some 250,000 invoices yearly, five-fold. One for the Customer and 4 for internal usage. It took me a year to go back to just printing one for the Customer and one for internal/external compliance (if someone needed a copy they could just print that 1 copy).
Yesterday my LinkedIn Connection posted something that really got my attention: “Enterprises spend 3% of their gross margin on printing”.
So, in the age of Digital Transformation, we spend 3% of our margins on un-digitalizing the digitalized?
That is a gigantic amount of money. Probably a substantial portion of that output will be scanned on the receiving side to digitalize it again and then ends up in the shredder. Not to mention the enormous impact this has on the environment.
Wouldn’t it be a quick and very big WIN to include “End the paper Trail, Go Paperless” in every conversation we have on Digital Transformation? Law makers, Compliance Officers, Marketeers, please come into the 21st Century, you’re welcome here.
Paper is just so B.G. (Before Google)