Paper-based processes cost more than they appear to. Not just the obvious paper, printers, toner, and archive space — but the hidden costs: search time, transcription errors, duplicate data entry, lack of traceability. A Fraunhofer Institute study finds that SMB employees spend up to 30% of their working time on activities that digital workflows could eliminate or drastically reduce.
The real cost of paper-based processes
A concrete example: a leave-approval process in a 20-person company.
- Employee prints and fills out a form: 5 min.
- Form lands on the manager's desk — when they see it: unknown.
- Manager signs, forwards to HR: 3 min + wait.
- HR enters the leave into the calendar manually: 3 min.
- Employee chases the status after a few days: 5 min of both parties' time.
Total per leave request: ~20–30 min. Across 20 employees × 15 leave requests/year = over 7 hours annually — just on leave. With a digital workflow: under 2 minutes per request, fully automated.
What a digital workflow gives you
- Transparency: every participant sees the status in real time.
- Speed: approvals that took days finish in hours.
- Traceability: full audit trail — who approved what, when.
- Error reduction: required fields, auto-validation, and plausibility checks eliminate transcription errors.
- Scalability: digital workflows run equally well with 10 or 200 requests/day.
The three highest-potential areas
1. Internal approval processes
Leave requests, expense claims, investment approvals, purchase requests — anything today running on paper or email ping-pong can become a structured digital workflow.
2. Inbound documents (invoices, contracts, inquiries)
Automatically recognise, classify, validate, and hand incoming invoices to the accounting system — without a human typing anything.
3. Customer processes (onboarding, order processing)
Welcome new customers automatically, deliver credentials, have contracts signed digitally, and push all relevant data into CRM and ERP.
How to start
Pick one process that's part of your daily life and where you regularly think: "this ought to be simpler". Describe it in 5 steps. Then talk to us — in our free discovery call we'll show you concretely how to digitise that process in 2–4 weeks. Our workflow digitalisation service always starts with a quick win so you see value immediately.
"Digitalisation doesn't start with software — it starts with the courage to question a process."
Sources
- Fraunhofer IAO (2023): Working in digital transformation. fraunhofer.de
- Bitkom e.V. (2024): The paperless office — status and potential in German businesses. bitkom.org
- AIIM (2023): The Paper-Free Progress Report. aiim.org
- PwC Germany (2024): Digital processes in the Mittelstand. pwc.de