Imaging industry body AIIM has released new global research that shows significant responsiveness and productivity gains in customer service when paper-based bottlenecks are eliminated from business processes.

Speed of response times are also realised by employees working remotely in the field or home offices when the ability to share and search is improved by using digitised content.

According to Doug Miles, director of market intelligence at AIIM, "The earlier in the process that capture takes place, the better the transparency and availability the content will have. The data is available to the process faster, and paper forms handling is eliminated."

Key findings of the research conducted between November 2011 and January 2012 show:

* Paper is beginning to disappear, with 35 percent of respondents confirmed less paper consumption and photocopying;
* 42 percent of scanning and capture projects achieved a payback period of 12 months or less, while 57 percent of projects achieved payback in 18 months or less;
* Mobile and cloud services for scanning and capture are finding early adopters in the enterprise;
* 38 percent of respondents are equipping employees with portable capture devices when not in the office, including portable scanners, smart phones and tablets;
* 20 percent of the largest organizations are committed to a cloud deployment strategy for capture;
* Scanning and capture can seriously improve customer response times – typically between 2 and 3 times faster, but in many cases 5 and 10 times faster.

Despite significant benefits realized by paper-free organizations, some poor habits persist:
* 77 percent of invoices that arrive as PDF attachments are printed, while 31percent of fax invoices are printed and then re-scanned;
* 45 percent of documents that are scanned were completely "born digital."
* 32 percent of organizations reported an increase in the level of paper consumption and copying.

The full report, "The Paper Free Office - Dream or Reality" can be downloaded HERE . This research was underwritten by: ABBYY, EMC, IBM, Kofax, and Swiss Post.