There are quite a few paper-heavy industries that have begun making the move to digital documents, especially legal and financial businesses. But there are many other companies that can benefit from using tablets and electronic documents that may be overlooked, like the construction industry. One company discovered this when a new project required immense volumes of paper, and using iPads may create a savings of $5 million.
An article in CITE World detailed the thought process of moving from paper to iPads when a construction firm was creating plans to rebuild two terminals in the Dallas-Fort Worth Airport. In all, the company would need to print out more than 60,000 documents.
“We kept thinking, that’s got to be off by an order of magnitude here,” Jeff Pistor of Balfour Beatty said. “We came to the conclusion that trying to run this project on paper would be problematic — or we’d need to hire much bigger superintendents to carry the paper around.”
Instead, 50 iPads were purchased and the company set up a trailer to hold all the network information and control the documents the tablets have access to. This means that instead of trying to find any new information during the construction process, workers can simply flip through their iPads.
So far, Balfour Beatty has saved about $1.2 million, and savings are expected to be about $5 million at the end of the seven-year project. Becoming a digital construction company also means fewer mistakes – something very uncommon in the construction business.
Even for businesses that aren’t working with 60,000 or more documents, this scenario points out many good reasons to switch to electronic data. Especially with the help from bulk scanning services, companies making the transition to digital documents can see the advantages of going paperless quickly.
Tab Service Company is a Chicago based company and the leading provider of document scanning services and data entry services. As an SOC2-approved service organization, we apply industry-best practices to our approach with clients.