Stop The Real Costs of Paper Documentation

Thu, 26 Mar 2026 12:00:06 Z

Proof of condition — it’s been around for decades and serves to verify the integrity of everything from material goods to heavy equipment and myriad assets in between. A paper process from the beginning, it has been accompanied by photographs, rubber stamps, and signatures along the way.

Still, hard to believe that a quarter way through the 21st century, with ubiquitous mobile device options, so many of these processes continue to reside on clipboards. And this paperwork can take hours, days or more to move from point of documentation to a recipient who can act on information reported within.

Even in the best of cases, an inspection sheet walked from a loading dock to a warehouse managers office or a logistics dispatcher will take a few minutes – — minutes that could mean the subject of said documentation has changed custody or even left the facility for its next stop in the supply chain.

Discover the savings

With supply chain costs continuing to rise, where can operations teams find savings by moving away from these paper documents to digital forms?

Proof of Condition: Time and money are lost when damaged goods arrive at the loading dock and given that over 10% of all unit loads have some degree of damage when they arrive at the DC, those real costs add up fast. The inverse is equally true, so avoiding chargebacks by documenting product/pallets were delivered in good condition protects shipper integrity and mitigates risk of fraudulent returns at each step along the chain.

Pre-trip Inspections: Performing a pre-trip inspection is not only prudent, but often required. However, it’s only as good any actions taken from the inspection. If that paper inspection is only reviewed after the vehicle has left the yard, costly breakdowns or roadside inspections could shut down deliveries – — and therefore revenue.

Safety Inspections: These come in a variety of flavours – — from the forklift or pallet jack inspection at the start of a work shift, to documenting injury incidents or near-misses, these are essential to worker safety, and also may be required documentation that needs to be readily available for audit.

Digitally transform the experience (and savings!)

Above are just a few common areas where operations teams benefit from moving to digital forms. Some, and I point to the Proof of Condition documentation as the example, offer an immediate opportunity to measure the value in financial terms. Avoiding chargebacks is a clear way to help the bottom line.

In other cases, the savings are more cost-avoidance. When a pre-trip inspection identifies risk, and that risk is addressed before the vehicle leaves the dock, goods are delivered on time and fines (or worse) are avoided. The same can also be said about ensuring work equipment is in good operating condition before a worker is put in danger.

Take a look at this infographic (and share it with your team) for further proof of where digitising documentation offers savings. Then, explore a process consultation with your Ivanti Wavelink supply chain partner to get started with digital forms. Within the Velocity platform, workflows can include Velocity Forms as a required step of the process – — such as forcing completion of a proof of condition statement, including photos, as part of the incoming inspection process when goods roll off the truck onto the loading dock.

Closing the gap between documentation completion and document action is a key reason to trash paper and move to digital forms. Information is routed to the appropriate recipients for review in a timely, relevant and actionable manner – — essential to controlling costs in operations when every second counts.

It’s a Matter of Security – How Offboarding Can Protect Your Business

Fri, 17 Jan 2020 23:36:02 Z

January is traditionally a time for new beginnings and the month that employees are most likely to think about changing jobs following the Christmas break and a period of reflection. It’s interesting that the average person will change careers 5-7 times during their working life and, according to a Deloitte survey last year, 43% of Millennials will leave their jobs within just two years. For companies, this rise in ‘short-term’ employees necessitates efficient and comprehensive onboarding and offboarding processes. With the imminent arrival of new team members, onboarding is given its due diligence to ensure that they can start-off from the get-go. Unfortunately, this is not the case when it comes to offboarding where the redistribution of workloads to maintain productivity can often be prioritised over effectively managing the offboarding process.

From a business perspective, this may seem logical, however, it exposes the company to vulnerabilities particularly when you consider that it can take over a week to fully deprovision an employee’s machine and access credentials to applications and cloud resources. Remember, during this time, leavers may still have access to corporate resources that can cause severe reputational damage if misused. After all, a disgruntled former employee who leaves due to unexpected termination or to work for a competitor, can be a source of data security breaches due to lax IT protocols.

With incomplete offboarding as one of the most serious risks to a company, we conducted a survey to delve deeper and discovered that once an employee does leave, nearly half of IT professionals are only somewhat confident that they no longer have access to the organisation’s critical systems and information. In today’s on-the-go society, employees access work through company mobile phones and laptops – all of which need to be returned before they leave the company. In some organisations, this process can be cumbersome or easily forgotten, resulting in loss of assets and ex-employees retaining access to resources.

What’s more shocking is that over half of those surveyed know someone who still has access to a former employer’s applications or data. What terrifies companies the most? Well, almost 40% fear leakage of sensitive data, while over a quarter worry about cybersecurity hacks and a similar number are concerned about malicious data deletion or theft.

It’s not uncommon that ex-employees with an axe to grind can wreak havoc on purpose. On the other end of the scale, ex-employees with good intentions can cause equally as much damage by accident. The main culprit is shared passwords for communal accounts. Shared by word of mouth or saved on file, these are often easy to remember. Although an employee has physically left the company, they still have remote access to these platforms unless the password is reset during offboarding.

With these concerns stacking up you may wonder why organisations don’t implement a water-tight offboarding process. One of the reasons for this reluctance may be because in some companies offboarding is an extremely manual and time-consuming task, executed through a series of complex processes requiring multiple forms, putting businesses off from allocating the necessary resources. Although, as more systems move into the cloud, it’s essential that, alongside other departments, IT is included in the offboarding process from the start. How can IT teams overcome these issues? Well, automation is part of the answer.

An automated IT infrastructure takes the headache out of laborious tasks. Companies no longer need to dedicate hours to completing the offboarding processes or live in fear of missing a system. This significantly reduces their downtime and frees-up IT teams to focus on more impactful jobs that improve the performance of the business.

Find out more about how Ivanti can help you streamline your offboarding process here.

Ivanti Blog: Posts by

Stop The Real Costs of Paper Documentation

Discover the savings

Digitally transform the experience (and savings!)

It’s a Matter of Security – How Offboarding Can Protect Your Business