When a large UK food producer began preparing for a major modernisation of its HR systems, it ran into a problem that appeared on nobody’s project plan. Around 7,600 personnel files – the employment records for its entire workforce – existed only on paper, distributed across twelve separate sites. Before any new system could be configured, any data migrated or any process automated, every one of those files had to be found, prepared and digitised.
This is not an unusual story. It is arguably the most common reason transformation programmes slip before they have properly begun. Research by Deep Analysis, M-Files and AIIM found that over 45% of business processes remain paper-based on average, with some sectors considerably higher[1]. The technology to replace those processes has existed for decades. The records they depend on, however, are still sitting in filing cabinets – and in rather worse places than that.
The bottleneck nobody budgets for
Transformation business cases are written around systems: the new ERP, the document management platform, the AI-readiness programme. What they tend not to include is a realistic account of where the source records actually are and what state they are in.
Consider the NHS – one of the most scrutinised and heavily funded digitisation programmes in the country. The National Audit Office confirmed that the target of a paperless NHS by 2018 was not achieved[2]. Five years later, a BMJ survey of 182 NHS trusts in England found that only a quarter were fully electronic, while 71% were still running paper patient notes and drug charts alongside their electronic record systems, and seven trusts relied on paper alone[3]. If an organisation under that level of regulatory and political pressure still depends on hybrid paper processes, the average mid-sized firm’s archive is unlikely to be in better shape. Paper that sits outside the system is not searchable, rarely audited, and cannot feed a digital platform without a deliberate digitisation effort first.
BCG’s research puts the failure rate of digital transformations at up to 70%[4]. The causes are usually framed in terms of strategy, leadership and change management. But beneath many of those failures sits a simpler, more physical problem: the programme assumed digital inputs that did not exist.
What twelve sites of paper actually costs you
The instinct is to measure paper in storage costs – floor space, off-site archiving fees, the occasional skip. That misses the real expense, which is access.
For the food producer, the most significant constraint was not the cost of holding 7,600 files. It was that answering any question about an employee’s history meant knowing which of twelve sites held the file, then physically retrieving it. An HR query that should take minutes took days. A compliance request meant a road trip. McKinsey Global Institute analysis found that interaction workers spend nearly 20% of the working week looking for internal information or tracking down colleagues who can help with specific tasks[5] – and that figure describes organisations whose information is at least nominally digital. Where the record is a paper file in another building, the retrieval cost is in a different category altogether.
Once the files were digitised, the benefit the business felt most immediately was exactly this: ease of access. Any authorised person, at any site, could reach any record in seconds. No system replacement, no process redesign – simply the removal of a physical constraint that had quietly shaped how the whole HR function worked.
Why “we’ll digitise later” quietly kills the roadmap
Digitisation rarely appears as a headline phase in a transformation plan. It gets treated as housekeeping – something to mop up once the interesting work is under way. The dependency runs in precisely the opposite direction.
Data migration assumes a digital source to migrate from. Data cleansing assumes records that can be queried, compared and de-duplicated. AI readiness assumes a corpus of structured, machine-readable information. Every one of those workstreams stalls the moment it reaches a record that only exists on paper in a cabinet eighty miles away. Deferring digitisation does not park the problem; it embeds a delay into every downstream phase of the programme.
There is a compliance dimension too. In regulated sectors, a record you cannot locate quickly is a record you cannot produce for an auditor, a subject access request or a regulator’s deadline. Paper held across multiple sites with no central index is a standing risk long before it becomes a transformation blocker.
Doing it properly: scope, retention, sequence
The temptation, once a digitisation project is approved, is to scan everything. That is usually a mistake. Digitisation is the natural moment to apply retention discipline – to ask which records still need to be held at all, and for how long.
In the food producer’s case, the review found that only a negligible proportion of the 7,600 files were past their retention period, so almost the entire collection was digitised. But the point is that the question was asked. A digitisation exercise that skips the retention review simply converts a paper liability into a digital one, and carries non-compliant records into the new environment where they are easier to find and harder to defend.
Sequence matters as much as scope. Digitisation belongs at the front of the transformation roadmap, not the end – because everything else on the roadmap depends on its output.
How Dajon helps
Dajon manages exactly this stage of the journey: secure, multi-site scanning and digitisation programmes that turn distributed paper archives into structured, accessible digital records – with retention review and records management built into the process rather than bolted on afterwards. For the food producer described above, that meant 7,600 personnel files across twelve sites converted into a single, instantly searchable resource. If paper is the unscoped dependency in your transformation plan, talk to us before it becomes the delay.
References
- 45% of Business Processes are Paper Based Deep Analysis[↩]
- Digital Transformation in the NHS National Audit Office[↩]
- NHS Still Reliant on Paper Notes and Drug Charts Despite Electronic Upgrades BMJ Group[↩]
- Five Ways to Beat the Odds on Digital Transformation BCG[↩]
- The social economy: Unlocking value and productivity through social technologies McKinsey Global Institute[↩]