Canadian Productivity Is Falling Behind-Can Automation Help Close the Gap?
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“Can Canada actually win a trade war with the U.S.?” That is the question posed in CBC’s About That video—and it raises a practical question for business leaders: how can we become more competitive when trade conditions are beyond our control?
For Canadian organizations navigating trade uncertainty, improving productivity is one area where they can act. How much of your team’s day goes into entering data, finding documents and following up on approvals?
These tasks keep work moving, but they also consume time that could go toward serving customers, supporting patients or solving problems. Multiply that effort across departments, and everyday administrative work becomes a significant productivity challenge.
Why Canada’s productivity gap matters
Labour productivity measures economic output per hour worked. It reflects how effectively people, technology and processes combine to create value.
A Statistics Canada analysis published in May 2026 highlights three reasons to take productivity seriously:
Slower growth: The report cites average annual productivity growth since 2000 of 0.8% in Canada, compared with 1.9% in the United States.
Weaker investment: Investment per worker declined by nearly 20% between 2014 and 2022.
Long-term importance: Productivity growth accounted for more than 90% of the increase in Canada’s real GDP per person since the early 1980s.
These figures establish the need for better productivity; they do not measure the impact of workflow automation specifically. Investment, skills, competition and industry structure all matter. For individual organizations, improving inefficient processes is one practical place to start.
Where everyday workflows lose time
A document can be digital and still require substantial manual work. An emailed invoice or electronic fax may need someone to read it, enter information into another system, check missing fields and decide where it goes next.
Common bottlenecks include:
Re-entering the same information across applications.
Sorting incoming documents and assigning them manually.
Waiting for approvals with limited visibility into status.
Correcting errors or requesting missing information.
In accounts payable, these steps can delay invoice processing. In healthcare, they can slow referral intake and routing. For municipal teams, they can absorb capacity needed to support public services.
Start by asking employees where information stalls. Their answers often reveal opportunities that a software inventory alone will miss.
How Process Fusion helps improve productivity
Process Fusion helps organizations automate document-intensive workflows and connect information with their existing business systems.
Capture and classify documents
Organize incoming invoices, forms and other documents so employees spend less time sorting and forwarding them.
Extract and validate information
Convert document content into structured data and apply validation rules, reducing repetitive entry while directing exceptions to employees for review.
Route work to the right people
Move documents through defined review and approval steps, with clearer ownership and visibility into outstanding work.
Connect with existing systems
Transfer validated information into supported business applications, reducing the need to copy data between disconnected tools.
The aim is to reduce administrative handling while keeping people involved in exceptions, approvals and decisions that require judgement.
What could recovered time look like?
For Laurentide Controls, implementing PF 360 Capture delivered measurable improvements in accounts payable:
50% reduction in AP processing time
60% increase in productivity
Up to 1,000 hours saved annually
The company also avoided hiring a second AP staff member and reported greater job satisfaction after removing repetitive data entry.
These results show how automating everyday document workflows can free up capacity within an existing team—helping employees accomplish more while reducing administrative effort.
Read the Laurentide Controls case study.
The same opportunity extends to healthcare, where less manual document handling can mean more time for patient care. Healthcare teams can achieve similar productivity gains by reducing manual document processing. In our webinar, How AI Is Turning Fax into an Interoperability Tool, Horizon Health Network joined us to explore how AI can turn faxed documents into structured data—helping teams spend less time rekeying information and process referrals more efficiently.
Watch the recording here.
Canada’s productivity challenge has many causes. Within your organization, progress can begin with a specific, measurable change: less rekeying, fewer delays and more time for useful work.
Talk to Process Fusion about improving your document workflows and helping your team accomplish more with the systems they already use.
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