A wide variety of digitalization solutions can help your business discover new efficiencies and drive enhanced productivity
Today’s savvy business leaders know it’s time to go digital. But they may have questions about how to do so. After all, digital transformation requires more than simply digitizing materials. An effective digital transformation demands digitalization. That means building digital workflows and replacing analog tools with digital tools. These tools can reveal new and improved work processes.
But what, exactly, is digitalization? And how does one know which digitalization technologies to use? This guide will show you how some digitalization solutions have benefited industry leaders. Learning from their examples can help you determine how to transform your own business.
Digitalization isn’t just a buzzword — it’s the present for industries around the world. Read our comprehensive guide to make sure your business is on track.
What does digitalization mean, and why is it important?
Digitalization means transforming analog workflows into digital ones. It often includes changing business models to provide new revenue and value-producing opportunities. To digitalize your business, you’ll need digitalization technologies. These tools will replace their analog counterparts. For instance, consider an analog document workflow. It might use file folders and file cabinets to store essential documents. Transitioning these documents to a paperless workflow could mean using document management software as a digitalization platform.
These changes can affect operations across the business. Communications, project management, IT management, and more can benefit from digitalization tools. These tools can streamline workflows, tighten security, reduce material costs, and power new efficiencies. Take the example of document management from earlier. This digitalization software can speed up information lookup with indexing and search. Documents it houses are encrypted and password protected. Workers can share them instantly over any distance. Automations and templates can trim repetitive tasks. These benefits and more can sum up to impressive value gains.
Did You Know?: PaperStream NX Manager can administrate up to 1,000 scanners across multiple locations. Click here to learn more.
Digitalization tools that support your business
Digitalization software comes in many forms. Each addresses a different part of your business. Broadly speaking, the more of your business you digitalize, the more efficiently you can operate. Centralizing these processes can maximize that efficiency. So can using solutions that communicate with one another.
Communication: Slack
Digitalizing communication makes it easy for coworkers to collaborate. Instant messaging is step one. Slack starts there. But it also includes voice and video calls, customizable chat channels for departments, and file sharing. It benefits from a vast number of integrations from Google Drive to HubSpot. And companies of any size, from small businesses to the enterprise level, use it with success. A Forrester study found companies see a 338% return on investment and $2.1 million in productivity savings with Slack. That’s why Verizon, IBM, Target, and more use this digitalization tool.
Project management: Asana
Keeping track of projects can be a mammoth task. Project managers need tools that provide visibility into each project and encourage open communication. Enter Asana. With it, users can create projects and tasks within those projects. They can assign those tasks to one another and track status at a glance. Different visualization modes, such as timeline and list view, make Asana versatile for many industries and projects. Marketing, operations, and product teams alike can benefit. Plus, powerful workflow automations trim repetitive tasks. Real-time reporting gives insight into productivity, workload, and more. Data is even end-to-end encrypted and regionally backed up to help meet compliance standards.
Around 80% of Fortune 100 companies used Asana as of February 2022. Amazon, Deloitte, and Uber were among them. Spotify used the digitalization software to effect a 50% increase in monthly ad campaign production. Asana also doubled Spotify's internal project managers’ capacity with process streamlining.
IT management: PaperStream NX Manager
The bigger the company, the more ground IT managers must cover. With devices spread across multiple locations, centralized controls quickly become essential. PaperStream NX Manager provides a solution. Whether on-premises or via private cloud, IT managers can control multiple devices on a single network. PaperStream NX Manager doesn't require a connected PC, which minimizes the use of additional hardware. It can decrease the likelihood of errors caused by humans and powers remote settings adjustments. All the while, it maintains document security. That keeps document intake simple, speedy, and streamlined.
Omni Logistics integrated PaperStream NX Manager and fi-7300NX scanners in four departments. Doing so cut processing time at its warehouse in half. The company's general manager said the scanners quickly paid for themselves.
Accounts payable automation: ABBYY
When accounts payable slows down, the whole business slows with it. But the rise of automation has changed this business process for the better. ABBYY’s accounts payable automation speeds up invoice cycles while boosting security. Its automatic invoice processing works with a wide array of documents. Different languages, complex table structures, even unstructured data — ABBYY can handle it. Plus, its low-code/no-code design makes it easy to optimize. And machine learning ensures it only gets faster over time.
When guitar and accessories manufacturer Fender started using ABBYY, it was processing invoices from more than 2,000 vendors. Many differed in layout and language. That made manual processing difficult. Moving to ABBYY automated that processing. ABBYY’s digitalization solution could even integrate with Fender’s pre-existing software. As a result, Fender saw improved efficiency and accuracy. That freed staff up to optimize operations and enhance the customer experience.
Content management: PaperVision Enterprise
Workers need a lot of materials to do their jobs. That can mean documents, forms, photos, videos, and more. Enterprise content management, such as PaperVision Enterprise, centralizes those materials. They’re then kept in a searchable repository to power rapid information lookup. Workers can check materials in and out for remote editing. And PaperVision can work with hundreds of file formats. All are kept within several layers of security. Digitech Systems designed PaperVision to meet a variety of global compliance and regulatory standards. Users can host the system on a single PC or across a globally distributed network.
Woodstock Hospital decided to use PaperVision for its medical records. With the system up and running, the hospital saved nearly $500,000 per year. The increased efficiency also reduced patient wait times.
Process documentation: Scribe
Healthy documentation has many uses. It can accelerate employee onboarding. It answers frequently asked questions. And it makes audits a breeze. But the process can be laborious. Automating it with Scribe means doing more in less time. Scribe’s simple browser extension captures your screen as you demonstrate a technique. It then uses AI to generate corresponding text instructions for each step and redact sensitive info. The results can be shared via link or saved to a company repository.
Fintech startup Crosscard struggled with manual documentation. Formatting could have been more consistent, and each piece of documentation took a long time to create. Integrating Scribe caused a 93% increase in production speed. That led to better sales enablement, more productivity, and faster auditing.
Customer support: Zendesk
Not all digitalization solutions face inward. Many can directly affect the customer experience. When a customer has trouble with your product, they need your support. Zendesk makes that easy to provide. It centralizes phone, email, and chat support for agents. It also lets them communicate in-app with coworkers to get help on tickets. Integrations with other apps can surface useful information and speed up solutions. Automations such as chatbots can help customers get support whenever they need. And built-in analytics can highlight areas for improvement.
Sustainable packaging platform noissue wanted to improve service to its 80,000 global customers. Tapping Zendesk led to a 5x improvement in support reply time. That helped its support team get through 14,000 monthly tickets and see triple the return business.
Did You Know?:The fi-7300NX network-enabled scanner can scan up to 60 pages per minute over a WiFi connection. That makes it ideal for medium to enterprise businesses. Click here to learn more.
Our recommendation: fi-7300NX
Those in the market for digitalization tools have no shortage of options, and they’ll need digitization tools to support their transformation. We take great pride in having spent the last 50+ years researching, designing and developing some of the most advanced and powerful electronics in the world, including our professional grade fi Series scanners.
Built to purpose for the most demanding document handling jobs, fi and SP scanners are capable of processing tens-of-thousands of pages per day at the highest levels of accuracy. Their intuitive integration capabilities with all existing work suites minimize time-to-value for businesses looking to invest in tools that will pay dividends for years to come.
We designed the fi-7300NX as an easy-to-use, cloud-ready network scanner. It's capable of 60-page-per-minute scanning, and can take jobs via USB, Wi-Fi, and Ethernet-wired connections. It also comes with free NX Manager software, equipping IT managers with the digitalization tools they need to keep the business running smoothly. Click here to learn more or shop the rest of our production scanner line.
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