Say goodbye to paper as Globe partnered up with cloud-based software provider Canvas in its continuing attempt to provide sustainable and innovative technology solutions. The partnership was officially unveiled at a press conference fittingly titled “Globe Paperless Revolution”.
Canvas is a solutions provider which, in a nutshell, attempts to help businesses and enterprises cut up the trouble of paperwork and streamline entire projects and agendas. Nikka Abes, Marketing Head of the IT-Enabled Services Group (IG) at Globe Telecom, discussed how inefficient using paper is – they take many forms like invoices, receipts, documents; filing and mailing takes a lot of time; they get lost and misplaced; paper and printing is expensive in the long run; and that generally paperwork is hard work.
Globe’s VP for IG, Rey Lugtu, attested to these adverse effects of paper. He said that by going paperless in their intra-company communications and customer transactions in the past few months, they’ve sent out more than 25,000 e-bills, saved around 3,000,000 pieces of paper or 3,200 trees, and of course saved a lot of money using Canvas. It’s a win-win situation for businesses and the environment.
Canvas is an innovative mobile app that improves work processes, reduces carbon footprint, and saves natural resources by reducing documents to digital fillable forms, uploading them to Canvas’ server, turning them into PDF and Excel files with time and place stamps, and automatically syncing files to everyone in the business. Canvas also allows you to create custom forms that range from simple fill-in-the-boxes to complex branching questionnaires. Testament to its functionality and practicality is its use by well-known brands such as Pepsi, IMAX, Toys R Us, and Target.
Media representatives got their first taste of Canvas right from the get go as they used its mobile app in the event registration. Done through a smartphone, the whole process was faster as the entire guest list was easily accessible, guests typed faster, and there were even innovative sign-up fields such as selfie signatures. There was even a short survey which took a shorter while to answer.
Dan Stevens, Canvas’ Channel and Partnership Manager for Australia, New Zealand, and Asia Pacific, expounded on the logic behind the software. Paper should follow the analog to digital evolution that other technologies such as music (from vinyls to MP3) and books (from print to eBooks) underwent. By going electronic, paper-borne problems like time spent encoding, copying and filing; storage volume and costs; inability to monitor work progress from ground up; lost paperwork; legibility, validity, and other compliance/audit issues are dropped.
Abroad, more and more businesses are switching from paper to Canvas as it applies to many things, namely data input, employee records, delivery tracks, immediate modification of important documents, and barcode scanning, among others. From people needing to manually collect data, data delivers itself to Canvas subscribers thus saving time and directing man hours to more important ventures. To prove that Canvas is as fast and efficient as he said, Stevens presented the complete raw and analyzed data from the survey conducted just a few moments earlier.
When asked what makes it different from other services, they said that it is fully-functional even when offline, only needing the internet for form uploads and syncing. Moreover, Canvas provides more types and options in creating forms, with users only restricted by their coding prowess. Completed forms, even with plenty of images, are highly-compressed into just a few hundred KBs as opposed to MBs. It also provides unlimited cloud storage as long as you’re connected to the service, with a window for downloading your PDFs in case you don’t renew your subscription.
As Canvas’ exclusive Philippine partner, businesses wanting to go the paperless route can go to canvas.globe.com.ph or e-mail [email protected] to subscribe to the service, announced Globe Head of Business Application for IG, JD Montelibano. Once signed up, a PHP 500 fee per user every month will allow employees to create and submit unlimited forms. Existing documents can be converted into forms, with the first two form conversions free of charge, and a one-time charge of PHP 1,500 to PHP 10,000 on succeeding forms, depending on the complexity. Canvas also accepts custom-made forms with a single fee of PHP 8,000 to PHP 65,000, again depending on difficulty.
Ending the presentations was the ceremonial paper shredding to signify the end of paper trails at Globe. Afterwards, the media got up close and personal to Canvas, testing its applications in a mock office, construction field, and warehouse.
Asked about their future plans and further applications of the software, Stevens, Lugtu, and Montelibano answered that Canvas is not only limited to businesses as schools and even government offices can take advantage of the smooth and seamless transactions brought by paperless technology.