Cloud cover to help sweep in paperless workplaces

The power of digitisation - why paperless offices will be a very real concept within 10 years as cloud computing takes over.

Bruno Delamarre, general manager, Small Mid Market Solutions & Partners, Microsoft Middle East & Africa. Satish Kumar / The National

Ten years from now workplaces will be completely free of paper thanks to cloud computing, says Microsoft’s regional general manager for small businesses.

It is a future “full of promise”, says Bruno Delamarre, general manager of small and mid-market solutions and partners for Microsoft Middle East and Africa, with digital tools “replacing traditional methods of working”.

The division focuses on providing scalable, agile, real-time and secure solutions to small- to medium sized enterprises (SMEs).

“Workplaces will be fully digitised and paperless, and cloud computing will dominate,” he says. “Technology solutions and devices will enable people to communicate and connect with anyone at any time, eliminating many of today’s challenges.”

Cloud computing means storing and accessing data and programmes over the internet instead of on your computer’s hard drive, effectively in a pay-as-you-go monthly rental model.

“Adoption of cloud computing negates the need for large, upfront investments in on-premise solutions,” says Mr Delamarre. “Instead, customers only need to pay for what they need, when they need it.”

If a small business receives an unexpectedly large order, or wants to open a new store or develop e-commerce, he says, they can “scale and grow quickly”.

But cloud, he says, is more than an IT platform - it is a “powerful driver for fundamental business change”.

That is because cloud solutions do not require a “high level of expertise to deploy”, says Paul Kerridge, head of partnerships and alliances at Pagero Gulf, which provides cloud order and payment services.

Many companies in the region, he says, choose not to digitise or automate high-volume activities because they think they can just “add more staff”.

But that “simplistic view is fatal”, he says. Digitisation is low-cost and eliminates errors and its adoption can “quickly improve customer service levels, increase sales and reduce costs”.

And, lethally, new businesses can quickly disrupt the market through “extensive use of digitisation practices” - as has happened globally with disrupters like Uber to taxis and Airbnb and Booking.com to the hotel industry.

Digitisation and automation technologies can streamline “otherwise manual” activities, Mr Kerridge says. For firms that have not digitised much of their business yet, he believes the largest gains can be found in switching to e-commerce for orders and payments, auto­mated order management and electronic invoicing.

“The most valuable areas of ­focus are functions with repetitive manual work, or where there are regular direct interactions with customers and suppliers,” he says. This is where digitisation can automate activities, give customers a consistent experience and increase the speed of operation.

In a “simple digital flow”, Mr Kerridge adds, an order could be received electronically, automatically verified and loaded into an IT system to be picked, packed and shipped, with customers automatically advised of order receipt and delivery and invoices then automatically sent for payment.

Microsoft’s Office 365 enterprise solution starts at US$5 per user per month – for $20, for instance, a package could include the Office suite installed on computers, with tablet and phone apps, email, 1TB of cloud file storage, Skype for Business videoconferencing and Microsoft Teams, a shared digital workspace.

Other new features for SMEs include Outlook Customer Manager – a lightweight customer relationship manager (CRM) that offers a view of all interactions with individual customers in a timeline and helps track tasks and deals in progress - and Microsoft Bookings, which allows small businesses to create a public booking page where customers can schedule appointments themselves.

The two Al Diyafah schools in Dubai, for instance, use Microsoft’s OneNote to create a library of policies, procedures, deadlines and the school calendar, says Mr Delamarre, as well as Office 365 app Sway for teachers to create interactive, Web-based lessons, assignments, project summaries and newsletters.

Ateis, a fire and security alarm manufacturer, uses Office 365’s Yammer private social networking for better internal collaboration among its 80 regional staff, and OneDrive for document back-ups, he adds.

“Cross-company collaboration is still one of the largest issues within a business,” he says. “Cloud solutions are giving businesses and entrepreneurs the freedom and ability to communicate effectively – and better connected teams are more productive teams.”

Cross-border data flow from the Middle East to the rest of the world has increased more than 150-fold in the past decade, according to management consultancy McKinsey.

SMEs have been empowered to harness “the power of the cloud”, says Mr Delamarre.