Paper documents have always been a mainstay of the office setting, but more and more studies are showing that continued usage of paper is not only costly to business, but environmentally detrimental as well. Industry studies reveal that approximately 90% of business information is conveyed in paper and that businesses will misfile about 20% of their records. Paper is still the predominant medium for information even though it is largely inefficient.
Paper is difficult to work with because it is a fragile and error-prone information carrier. They require time to locate, and are liable to misplacement and damage, which proves costly. Research shows that nearly $14,000 of productivity is lost per worker per year just trying to find the necessary information. This coupled with the fact that 7.5 billion documents and 15 trillion copies of said documents are created each year leads to staggering costs. These figures can be prevented simply by using less paper and utilizing more electronic document technologies, such as OCR. OCR, or optical character recognition, converts scanned documents into text searchable and editable documents, relieving the business of long and expensive searches.
OCR is a technology that has been around since the early 20th century. Its usefulness and application is now more relevant than ever given the increased information consumption of businesses and individuals. Continued and wasteful use of paper affects the environment negatively since it depletes natural resources like trees. Investing in OCR and transitioning to a paperless mindset is a good way to offset the shortcomings and risks associated with paper usage.