Business Process Outsourcing Blog

Some of a business’ most valuable assets are ideas. From research data in lab notebooks to proprietary designs and trade secrets, intellectual property (IP) comes in many forms, making it a challenge to know how to protect it. But how can you use technology to manage your intellectual property when it’s paper-based?

A company can have many different types of assets. Many think of them in the physical sense, such as equipment, inventory and buildings. However, what about signed contracts, drawings, lab notebooks, and other intellectual property contained on paper? If these documents are lost or damaged, the business itself could be in jeopardy. What's the best way to track or even insure these documents in an asset management sense?

Have you thought about how an unforeseen catastrophe might affect your business? Even something as random as an electrical fire or crane accident can lay an unprepared company low. Were a catastrophic event to take place that affected your organization’s base of operations, how would you deal with the fallout?

Natural disasters come in many varieties, from floods and fires to landslides and tornados. Often times, the full impact for a business is not fully realized until it’s too late and critical business information is lost. The impact is sometimes so great that 25% of businesses never reopen following a major disaster. However, that fate is avoidable if the proper steps are taken to create a formal disaster recovery plan for your business.

What do Hurricane Sandy, the polar vortex and Bridgegate all have in common? They’re all recent disasters, from natural to man-made, that made it difficult for employees to get to the office and impossible for others. For most organizations, the result is a painful loss of productivity from idle employees at home.

For a business, what’s worse than a natural disaster? Consider the enormous legal and financial risk of losing contracts, documents needed to prove compliance, and other critical information kept on paper. Not being able to produce these documents can result in lost business, regulatory fines and increased exposure to legal action. Minimizing this risk has never been more preventable and affordable with secure cloud document management software.

Many organizations are drowning in paper and faced with the persistent question: What is the best way to minimize and manage paper? It is a problem that plagues both private and public organizations, and was highlighted in a report released last summer describing how the Veterans Administration is struggling to store and manage the volumes of documents it must process.