Are you wondering what to invest in? Digitalization will reduce your company costs in the long term

According to our survey from March 2023, 59% of Czech companies want to invest in technologies with a quick return on investment to reduce their costs. If you are also wondering what technologies to invest in at the end of the fiscal year, or what to plan your budget for next year, get inspired by the article. We have described 5 common problems that companies get rid of thanks to digitalization, saving hundreds of thousands to millions of CZK per year.

1. Long hours of manually rewriting documents

Companies that receive documents by email, post or WhatsApp spend dozens of hours a month transcribing them into the accounting or ERP system. This is tedious work that leads to errors . Transcribing costs companies up to hundreds of hours of work per month depending on the volume of documents. By automating this activity, they can save up to millions of crowns per year .

There are several ways to eliminate retyping. Companies with a large number of suppliers and a large volume of invoices are implementing EDI – a technology for the electronic exchange of orders, delivery notes or invoices in a structured format. Thanks to EDI, among other things, data from documents is automatically rewritten into the company system.

For example, the Muziker online store saved dozens of hours per month after implementing EDI .

Companies use EDI primarily for the exchange of documents related to goods. For other received invoices, they use data extraction tools . These automatically read the data from the received documents in the email inbox and prepare them for insertion into the information system. The employee only checks the correctness of the data and approves it.

2. Slow document approval and document loss

A large invoice has arrived from a supplier, which in some companies means that an employee (typically an invoicer) circulates the document to three managers in the company and requires their approval and signature . If this happens regularly, chaos ensues. Invoices lie on tables for days or get lost during approval and never reach the accounting department. Suppliers send reminders and people solve problems instead of working, so the company loses money and complicates its cash flow .

Physical approval of documents can be replaced with simple electronic approval tools in a web browser . You set up approval processes for different types of documents in the system (for example, by amount), and as soon as an invoice arrives, the system passes it on to the first approver. The approver receives an email notification, clicks on the invoice and approves it with one button, sending it to the next approver in the sequence. Everything is faster, clearer and documents are not lost .

Similar solutions are used, for example, at JABLOTRON ALARMS, where they shortened the approval process from days to hours .

3. Shelves full of paper documents and high printing costs

Documents are sent to you electronically, but you then print them out and put them in folders. If you deal with dozens or hundreds of documents a day in this way, you are adding work and unnecessarily spending money on paper, printing, and possibly even shelves and spaces for storing documents. In large companies, these costs can climb to tens of thousands of crowns per month .

Many tools, from ERP systems to EDI to electronic approval tools, now enable secure electronic archiving of documents that complies with legislation . In addition, if you record documents electronically, you can use filters to find any document within a minute and do not have to leaf through folders for it.

4. Slow order picking

The warehouse is a place where digitalization has a huge impact on costs and work efficiency. A typical scenario looks like this: Every morning, warehouse workers print out orders, pick up items one by one, and walk around the warehouse unnecessarily – so-called mushrooming.

Warehouse workers often only keep track of the distribution of goods in their heads , so when they get sick or leave the company, new warehouse workers have to go through a lengthy training process. This regime may work in small warehouses, but as the company grows or hits a peak, they have to hire more and more warehouse workers or implement smarter solutions.

To streamline shipping, warehouses use barcode scanners and warehouse management systems, or WMS . Picking is done by sending orders to warehouse workers' scanners or smartphones, which they then process one by one. The WMS guides them to the correct goods using navigation and allows them to pick several orders at once . Thanks to these processes, warehouse workers process orders several times faster. Companies thus save time in the warehouse , which costs tens of thousands per month.

5. High error rate in the warehouse

When warehouse workers are filling orders and searching for the right size among identical sweatshirts, it's easy to make a mistake —and solving each mistake adds extra work.

In this case too, the aforementioned WMS helps. It guides warehouse workers to the goods from the order using a scanner and, after reading the barcode, confirms that the warehouse worker has reached for the correct piece . The system thus makes it almost impossible to make a mistake, and companies that have implemented it usually see their warehouse error rate drop below 1% .

This type of solution was implemented, for example, by the barefoot shoe e-shop Bosonožka, which accelerated the processing of returns by 65% .

How to start investing in digitalization

If you want to invest in the aforementioned technologies and not burn yourself out, contact us . We have successfully kicked off digitalization in hundreds of Czech companies and we will be happy to help you too.