How to cut paper costs and speed up business transactions

If your business is spending too much time and money on completing paper forms and routing them to the relevant people or suppliers, and you have plans to move towards a paperless office to pure information capture, then UK-based electronic-forms software specialist, Cardiff Software might just have the answer. The argument is quite convincing if you’re a large, paper-intensive organisation. Consider the costs of paper to businesses: Cardiff estimates that paper forms currently cost European businesses more than £20 billion every year, with the UK figure at around £2.5 billion in 2000. It also reckons that around 30% of these paper forms actually become obsolete before they’re even used. Dan Shirra, Cardiff Software’s vp worldwide comments: “Our differentiator is that we can handle both electronic and paper forms for our clients. It’s all about getting information into a usable format [XML or PDF] for routing or archiving.” “Business benefits come from the elimination of data entry staff, lower quality assurance processing costs, faster routing and tracking of information around the business and total paper costs are slashed,” he adds. Paul Savage, Cardiff’s UK & Eire sales manager, refers to this whole issue as, “The paper to digital gap,” or the “Disconnect between online and offline implementations and investments…There’s also inconsistent data formats within companies that limits application sharing.” But while many firms have invested huge sums of money in e-commerce software over the last few years, changing their business processes to suit new software, Savage warns: “With our software and hardware [scanners from the likes of Fujitsu and Canon], you don’t have to worry about destroying your existing business processes straight away. Doing things at web speed can be a black hole for financial justification and ROI.” As well as high-resolution scanners and barcode readers, Cardiff can offer clients software (Teleform) that captures information from paper forms and converts this to XML or PDF formats. Its LiquidOffice application can then route and track this information around the business using in-built workflow technology. Cardiff has 23,000 customers globally, including the likes of Daimler-Chrysler and British Aerospace, with around 3,000 of these based in the UK. About 60 customers are in the manufacturing and distribution sector. Savage also reckons that a third of all UK businesses are still in a hybrid paper-electronic situation, with two-thirds of all businesses still using paper forms. “The key to our solutions is interpreting data whether it’s in the form of hand print, hand signatures, machine print or barcodes. And it’s not all electronic, there’s always some form of human intervention required,” explains Savage. He estimates that for barcoding and check box verification, Cardiff’s software is greater than 99% accurate; for machine print, it’s between 95 and 98% accurate; and for hand signatures the figures are somewhere between 92 and 95% accurate. And it’s pretty inexpensive stuff we’re talking about here. Savage: “For as little as £5,000, a company can capture 1,000 forms per day with our software.”