Mid-sized businesses are different from small startups and large organizations. This is because they often have more resources and a wider market reach than smaller businesses but also face stricter budgets and lower operational efficiencies than large corporations. This middle space means mid-sized firms can be dynamic like small firms but also aim for scalable growth like big businesses.
For mid-size companies, where growth often outpaces their existing systems, document digitization helps streamline processes, reduce costs, and improve customer experiences—bridging the gap between operational limitations and growth opportunities. Let’s break down why embracing this change can propel businesses toward a future of success where they can compete more effectively with larger firms while maintaining the flexibility of smaller ones.
The Business Imperative Behind Document Digitization
Think about spending many hours manually entering data from handwritten notes, sifting through paper-based documents, and searching for critical records. Now imagine not being able to find what exactly you’re looking for when you actually need it!
A report by Xerox suggests that 46% of workers in SMBs waste time on inefficient paper-based manual processes every day. Another report states, 83% of employees must rebuild missing documents wasting a lot of valuable time and efforts. These document-related inefficiencies cost time and money which directly impacts growth of businesses and result in productivity loss.
Document digitization offers a streamlined alternative. By transforming paper documents into digital formats, businesses can improve access to information, increase data security, and reduce operational costs associated with physical storage and manual labour. Moreover, digitized documents improve collaboration across teams, irrespective of their location and proximity. They allow employees to share files instantly, edit them in real-time, and track changes—boosting productivity and reducing delays.
AI’s Impact on Mid-Sized Business Transformation
Beyond simply scanning and storing documents, AI-powered systems can extract insights i.e. valuable data, automate workflows, and even project trends based on that data. For instance, a contract management system that not only stores your agreements in digital format but also sends reminders for renewals, highlights important terms, and provides insights on compliance—all with no human intervention.
Equipping them with such capabilities, AI helps mid-size businesses tap into the full potential of their data, making it easier to analyze, optimize, and use the information for smarter decision-making. And with ML, these systems continue to improve and evolve, becoming more efficient and accurate over time.
The Digital Advantage: Case Studies in Mid-Size Business Digitization
Mid-size companies in various industries are already reaping the benefits of digitization. Let’s look at some real-world success stories.
A particular UK-based insurance company needed to scale their organization efficiently by streamlining the way they responded to their customers’ complex insurance needs. To achieve this, they digitized over 100,000 documents through tools with similar capabilities to image printers that print to image. This transition helped shift the company towards a paperless office with simpler processes, and easier to manage, streamlined electronic documents. In the end, with less effort going into sifting through paperwork, employees were able to speed up their ability to respond to client demands.
In another example, a large corrugated cardboard manufacturing company turned to document digitization to fix their manual, labour-intensive process of sifting through invoices for their accounts payable department. The former process required 30+ personnel to sort through 35,000 purchase orders and invoices from more than 10,000 unique vendors per month. All of these indicates how the process could become tedious, time-consuming, and error prone. To streamline the entire process and reduce the manual effort, systems were built enabling automated approvals on files once they were digitized. By converting the paper invoices into electronic documents, specialized software would then recognize critical information fields and automatically process the information, removing the dependence of manual labour from staff.
Due to the successful implementation of this digitization effort, the 32 employees were freed up and reallocated to other areas of the organization. The increased efficiency also led to faster document handling processes and less errors.
In a slightly different but related example, a Canadian law firm leveraged the power of document digitization to overcome its problem of storage. The firm’s overwhelming volume of paper documents necessitated a huge amount of physical storage space which was proving to be very costly and difficult to find. Additionally, depending on the complexity of the filing system, many valuable hours were being wasted by their personnel in looking for the right documents on time-sensitive cases.
The law firm found a solution to both these problems by converting their paper documents into electronic documents which allowed for not just centralized storage of critical information, but also for easy searchability. This shift to digitized documents helped the firm reduce the cost and fees associated with storage, and also improve their efficiency in finding critical documents, allowing them to better serve their clients.
The above case studies indicate why mid-sized enterprises are rapidly moving towards document digitization solutions to scale better and faster.
Felix Solutions stands at the forefront of document automation, utilizing cutting-edge technology like artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), and natural language processing (NLP) to extract data with an accuracy of more than 99%. With a focus on transforming unstructured document into actionable data, Felix Solutions empowers businesses to automate critical workflows like invoicing, contract management, claims processing and more. With the integration of AI & automation the heavy lifting of these processes is taken care of, and so businesses can have increased operational efficiency, reduced costs, and boost in customer experience.
Growth Prospects for Businesses Digitizing Documents
Document digitization is not just about going paperless anymore, it is about future-proofing your business. Beyond the immediate operational improvements, digitization paves the way for scalable growth for businesses especially mid-sized. By investing in proper digital infrastructure today, mid-size companies are equipping themselves for tomorrow’s challenges, from expanding into new markets and dealing with regulatory changes to serving evolving customer needs.
The sooner businesses embrace this shift, the better they will be positioned to thrive in today’s digital age. Reach out to us and take the first step towards making your business more efficient.