Corona has led to a real digitisation battle among small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). Due to the pandemic, working from home became a short-term alternative for many SMEs. Only through modern homeworking could the core business be maintained in many business models. But companies must prepare themselves for the fact that employees will want to continue working in a hybrid model even after Corona. According to a study by the Leibniz Centre for European Economic Research (ZEW), remote working is not limited to the Corona period, but is a central desire of employees.
Since there is a shortage of qualified personnel in many areas, small and medium-sized companies would do well to position themselves as attractive employers in the face of large companies with flexible working models. But: the new working world has consequences for the way information is accessed, processed and archived. In many companies, paper mail remained unprocessed for between 10 and 14 days during Corona. This had and continues to have an impact on efficiency and the flow of information. It is not unusual for employees to take documents and folders to the home office because they need them for their work. The consequence of the temporary solution is that the colleagues do not have access to the documents.
To ensure a smooth, efficient workflow in a hybrid work reality, solutions must be created that allow employees to access both physical and digital documents and information. Regardless of whether they work in an office or at home.
There are two important aspects to consider:
Digitisation of records and documents
Much information, such as order forms, CVs, plans or invoices, is still in paper form. In order to make this information available to employees efficiently and quickly, there are several possibilities. First: digitise and make available all archived files and all new documents in a virtual archive. Secondly: only the documents relevant to the daily work routine and all new documents are digitised. The physical archive is outsourced to an external service provider. If an employee still needs an archived document, it is digitised and made available by the service provider within 90 minutes.
Security
The efficiency and process optimisation achieved in this way must not, however, be at the expense of security. Information and data security is very strictly regulated. The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) regulates how personal data may be processed and used. Moreover, not all documents and information are suitable for all employees. Confidential and sensitive data require very strict access rights. Another security aspect is that tax-relevant documents must be stored in a verifiable manner. In addition, there are industry-specific requirements - for example in the financial, pharmaceutical or medical sectors - that must be taken into account in the archiving system. As no two needs are the same, when choosing a suitable service provider, care must be taken that the provider is able to adapt the software quickly and unbureaucratically to the individual requirements.
You can find more information on the subject of security in our whitepaper security!
