Efficient, accessible and secure - Toshiba is helping businesses to get the most from their data through digitisation
The drive to digitisation
All around Australia, homes have become workplaces, the meeting room is a glass screen and our colleagues are tens or even thousands of kilometres away. We’re relying more than ever on digital technology to get our jobs done.
Change was certainly afoot before the events of 2020/21 but the pandemic has dramatically increased the pace, and accelerated the move towards digitisation in business.
Businesses are therefore embracing digital technology to enable the new way we all work.
Toshiba leading the charge
Toshiba is at the forefront of the technology that enables digitised businesses. Brad Monsbourgh, Product and Marketing Manager with the company’s Electronic Imaging Division explains: “When you can’t hand over a printed document in the office, hold discussions around a boardroom table, or travel to meet in person, digital information becomes your lifeline, the only way to engage. At Toshiba, we’re experts in digitisation, and are helping businesses to put digital transformation into practice.”
The benefits of digitisation are far greater than a short-term solution to the temporary measures of lockdown. The changes that have been wrought in working practice over the last 18 months are almost certainly here to stay, long after the memory of lockdowns fades.
“For many businesses, remote working is now a fact of life and a permanent change”, says Monsbourgh. “Security remains a key issue too, and a PWC study found that 71% of CEOs are ‘extremely concerned’. Regulation and legislation is becoming increasingly demanding in many industries. Digital transformation helps to address all of these areas. It’s an essential business strategy that is here to stay.”
The value of digitisation is that it enables businesses to drive efficiencies, collaborate globally, provide new levels of customer service, reduce their environmental footprint and safeguard the security and reputation of their organisation. Which is why so many companies see digital transformation as the next era of business.
As experts in electronic imaging, Toshiba provides the systems that create, store, search and secure digital information. Their products and services are helping organisations around the globe to digitise documents, automate workflows, uncover insights and secure sensitive data.
Efficiency, access and security - finding the balance
“Documents are automatically routed between the people or departments that need to action them, either inside the company, or outside, to customers or suppliers. In an automated workflow, there’s a clear and auditable trail for every movement and touch of a document as it moves through the process.”
Monsbourgh explains how digitisation is helping businesses to become more streamlined, and at the same time more secure.
“Digitisation means that workflows can be automated”, he says. “Documents are automatically routed between the people or departments that need to action them, either inside the company, or outside, to customers or suppliers. In an automated workflow, there’s a clear and auditable trail for every movement and touch of a document as it moves through the process.”
“It’s a big departure from paper based systems, with documents walked around an office, or posted to the next part of the chain. The document’s location and processing status is visible at all times and there’s no ‘it’s in the mail’ delays and losses.”
“Once the process is complete, documents are routed to the appropriate secure storage location - which could be within the business’ own internal IT systems, or in the cloud, with Google, Dropbox or OneDrive.”
Business documents often contain sensitive data which must be kept highly secure. Digitisation enables compliance rules to be consistently applied to documents, keeping them secure and ensuring that the organisation is meeting its legislative obligations. Digitised documents are simpler to manage and track, helping to meet security standards, and with all documentation in a single, secure location, businesses can rapidly identify exposures and manage risk.
“It’s not a question of locking documents away forever”, explains Monsbourgh. “Businesses need to balance security and compliance with the fact that these are working documents that contain valuable business insights. They need to be searched and mined for information, but in a way that ensures that only those with the appropriate authorisations can get to the data.”
Digitisation opens opportunity
The pandemic has accelerated the pace of change, and driven the pace of digital transformation.
Businesses realise that digitisation unlocks massive opportunities - to drive down costs through greater efficiency, to find new insights by unlocking the information that has been ‘hidden’ in paper-based documents and to securely track, audit and manage information more securely.
Contact Toshiba for a free Print health and Digitisation review or explore more content on this site.
