Waste paper

In terms of collaboration, another 12.2 hours of productivity are lost per week per person due to approval or signature processes, and gathering and consolidating feedback.

Altogether, the document productivity gap costs a 1,000-person company an estimated US$15.9 million per year.

According to IDC, workers spend 15 hours of their workweek reviewing and approving documents.

In Southeast Asia, including Thailand, about 60 per cent of workers say they work with documents to facilitate reviews by multiple parties, as more and more information is being generated, shared and used in documents. 

Vicky Skipp, regional director of Adobe South, says Thai firms need to boost collaboration and extend infrastructure so that employees can be as productive on tablets and smart-phones as they are on laptops, and invest to make their business secure in an increasingly digital and complex environment.

To address the document productivity gap, Adobe has introduced the new Acrobat XI, which works across devices and platforms in managing the complex document challenges.

The new PDF software now has complete editing and export features to Microsoft Powerpoint, along with capabilities for tablets and mobile devices, allowing the tasks to be done anywhere, anytime.

“For example, I am a car designer and can’t start doing the work until you sign it off. You are away and won’t be back for many days due to an overseas assignment.

“I need your approval by Monday, so what do I do. To accelerate the process, you may give approval while on the move, if you could view the documents online via your computer,” she says.

Once the document productivity inefficiencies are addressed, a company with 1,000 employees will be able to hire an additional 213 people either for more sales, marketing, research and development or IT personnel, according to the IDC research.

Due to the growing number of mobile devices, and the use of cloud services, information workers should be able to work more efficiently anywhere, any time, with the new products.

The IDC research also shows that information workers still spend a quarter of their time working on documents in paper form rather than the electronic form, despite years-long attempts to reduce the use of paper in offices worldwide.

Over the past few years, the use of paper has been declining but only modestly. Among the reasons for the persistent use of paper are: old habits and the need to submit documents in paper form; the requirement for physical signatures, or a lack of comfort in electronic signatures; and the need to use documents in the field, where it is not convenient to have PCs or tablets.

In terms of collaboration, the research shows that information workers spend roughly half of their time collaborating with others inside or outside their offices, or in other countries, thus requiring software that makes it easier to work across distance, time zones and organisational boundaries.