
APAC will now focus on digital document processes spendings
CIO Review APAC | Monday, February 22, 2021

According to a Forrester report from 2020, APAC business executives are at risk of losing 31 percent of their clients and 43 percent of their income due to a lack of digital alternatives
FREMONT, CA: Currently, it is a critical time for business executives in the Asia Pacific (APAC) region. Not only are they operating in the midst of a worldwide pandemic, but many APAC enterprises are digitally behind their peers in other areas of the world. Their next steps in the coming year may determine the decade ahead of them.
In terms of digitizing workflow procedures, APAC companies have fallen behind their European and North American rivals. Only 12 percent of APAC companies, for example, have fully digitized document workflows. According to a Forrester report from 2020, APAC business executives are at risk of losing 31 percent of their clients and 43 percent of their income due to a lack of digital alternatives.
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Many APAC leaders assumed that, while distributed teams were here to stay, staff, customers, and suppliers would still occasionally interact face-to-face — meeting physically, signing paper contracts, and collaborating in person on a whiteboard — when assessing the COVID-19 pandemic's impact on business.
Even when the COVID-19 crisis has passed, it appears that such real-world contacts will be significantly less prevalent than before the pandemic. Those companies who do not integrate digital processes into their operations will find themselves at a competitive disadvantage. It's no surprise, then, that company leaders all over the world — including, most recently, those in the APAC area — now consider digitizing workflows' to be just as important as going on the cloud.
Adopting end-to-end digital procedures fosters cooperation, enhances staff productivity, increases customer happiness, and ensures greater document security, according to data collected over many years by APAC business leaders. A Forrester study commissioned by Adobe estimated that digitalization enhanced staff collaboration in 51 percent of APAC companies.
Further, 60 percent of APAC decision-makers see document workflow automation as a critical element for ensuring business continuity and agility, and 42 percent think the pandemic has accelerated their organization's adoption of e-signature capabilities. Over the following 12 months, APAC companies expect to increase their spending on digital document processes by 51 percent on average.
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