Businesses are enamored with the idea of the virtual office -- and one of the first steps in achieving a geographically spread-out office is reducing the vast reams of paper traditional offices use. The benefits of the "paperless enterprise" also stretch far beyond paper cost savings and environmental friendliness.
Human resources may be the department most dependent on paper. Its traditional processes result in three-ring binders and file cabinets full of employee forms, detailed benefit plan information and hundreds of voluminous contracts with suppliers -- and most documents require an update or renegotiation each year, when the whole edit and printing process starts anew.
The problem with paper-based HR Reliance on paper-based HR information management makes it almost impossible for HR experts to do their job well. Paper-only versions of supplier contracts cannot notify executives when the contract is up for renewal.
Learning that a company's most prevalent health-care contract has already expired eliminates any negotiating leverage or ability to execute a corporate strategy. The company's benefits strategy becomes a rush to find the best numbers so there's no lapse in insurance coverage.
When contracts are negotiated on paper, it's difficult to know which version is the most current. In many cases, the use of an older contract, especially in labor talks with unions, has cost companies millions of dollars in mistakes.
After selecting a new health-care plan and supplier prior to open enrollment, it is incredibly difficult to update and maintain required summary plan descriptions when the review and update process is done via paper. In fact, many large employers who have tens to hundreds of plans are out of compliance because the manual summary plan description update process is overwhelming -- and they are forced to give up so as not to throw away anymore valuable time or money.
Finally, paper makes it difficult, if not impossible, to maintain any sort of audit trail of updates or revisions to documents. Paper-based files only
allow access by one person at a time -- if the file is not lost in the first place. How is a company supposed to know what services and performance levels suppliers have committed to if it can't locate their contracts?
Furthermore, if the company needs to understand the reasons and background for negotiated terms, how can it if it only has a final document without an audit or comment trail?
Within the HR organization there are productivity, manageability and compliance reasons for moving to a centralized, automated HR information
management system.
HR organizations who have adopted an electronic system of record for all their HR data can use one source for current documents with a clear audit
trail. This centralized system allows controlled access to the latest documents by many users at once. It enables a parallel review-and-edit process in order to meet U.S. Department of Labor compliance mandates requiring all summary plan descriptions to be updated within 90 days of
changes to a plan.
A unique characteristic of HR plan and supplier documents is that much of the content in the documents is repurposed throughout most HR processes.
Centralized HR information management systems identify reusable data, allow users to update that data once and propagate it throughout the system to all applicable documents. This feature alone reduces manual effort, introduces efficiencies, eliminates keying errors and enables compliance.
Moving to a paperless enterprise, especially in the HR organization, is not only good for workplace flexibility and regulatory compliance, but should eliminate paper cuts and fire drills.
Michael Byers is president and COO of human resources management software company HighRoads Inc. of Woburn.
