Hardware for a Paperless Business?

Wescotte asks: "While the priority of moving paperless at my company is very low I've made it my personal mission to get rid of as much paper as I can. Creating a basic electronic form and approval system for our internal documents is a big job but I feel the largest hurdle will be creating a system in which the average employee can scan in additional documents to attach to these forms. For example am employee scanning in all receipts to attach to an expense report. Ideally I would like to find a piece of hardware that allows for print/copy/scan, and would allow for some personal identification by swiping our employee id card or even finger print identification. Does such a product exist and nearly compete price wise with the Xerox products?" Is anyone aware of a system or hardware additions that could streamline this process, and provide centralized document storage for document scans? "We currently have quite a few Xerox DocuCentre devices, located all over the building, that are accessible by all employees and most have the ability to scan to TIFF/PDF. Personal gripes about little software glitches in the scanning process aside, the real problem is putting these image scans into a central location yet easily identifiable by the employee after the scan.

Our Xerox machines allow us to create templates on each machine. This allows the user to select the destination of where the image should be stored. It would be ideal to store a template per employee so they would have their own folder of stored images. However, maintaining such a list would be far too large of an undertaking since each individual machine would have to have it's own list. Plus, navigating by employee name would be a chore because of the size of the company."

Comments

card reader

[phoenix.bam!]

program a serial card reader to accept the employee ID cards and send to the printer the directory to save the scan to. The card reader can even be updated via ethernet.

Going at this from the wrong angle

[Anonymous Coward]

Eliminating paperwork to save money or the environment is not done by transforming paperwork into harddrive space.

Here's what you do: take the most common form you fill out and pass around or turn in or whatever, like this hypothetical expense sheet. Find the person who receives and files that form. Fire them. Tell everyone else you better never see one of those forms again or they're gone too.

If any transfer of paper to electronic records happens, it will be because there was a real need for the information transfer taking place. For example, they may give out company credit cards and handle expenses that way.

By attempting to change the bullshit into electronic bullshit, you are just becoming part of the problem.

Re:Going at this from the wrong angle

[toddbu]

I'm in total agreement with this. I've seldom ever seen a paper to electronic system work well. Plus there are a lot of things companies do today that's no longer required. For example, there are many smaller receipts that no longer need to be kept. If I remember right (and I'm not a tax accountant, so go talk to yours), I think that receipts under $75 are no longer required in an audit. I don't know about your company, but in most companies this means that 50%-75% of receipts don't need to be kept. Of the remaining receipts, you may want to revist the way that you handle expense reports. If I remember right, Amex will give you copies of everything at year-end that you just stuff in a folder. If you're smart, you can get rid of virtually all receipts.

The only caveat is that businesses are usually very reluctant to change business processes, so make absolutely sure that you have buy-off from the bean counters before approaching the management. Document the cost of handling all that paper, and you may find yourself with a new hardware budget to simplify the transition.

Re:Going at this from the wrong angle

[TheLink]

If you pick the right sort of paper to use, you might actually be improving the environment. Because you will be taking carbon out of the air.

The trouble with most sorts of paper is that the process of processing them produces lots of toxic chemicals.

Re:Going at this from the wrong angle

[anthony_dipierro]

If I remember right (and I'm not a tax accountant, so go talk to yours), I think that receipts under $75 are no longer required in an audit. I don't know about your company, but in most companies this means that 50%-75% of receipts don't need to be kept.

It's really an issue of materiality. If you're a multi-million dollar software company, then you probably don't need to keep a receipt every time you buy a dozen bagels (although you might have to if you buy a dozen bagels every day). If you're a tiny one-man operation, then maybe you do need to keep records for these expenses (a company which has no evidence for 50-75% of its purchases isn't likely to do well in an audit). Then again, a tiny one-man operation probably isn't going to face an audit in the first place.

If I remember right, Amex will give you copies of everything at year-end that you just stuff in a folder.

Unless it's a cash transaction, the receipt is often superfluous anyway. Even with cash transactions keeping good records is more important than keeping receipts. If your company faces an audit and you hand the auditor a box of receipts, you're probably not going to do very well. On the other hand, if you hand over a file with well kept double-entry books, bank and credit card statements which reconcile to those books, and only a few receipts for some big ticket purchases, you'll probably do fine (unless of course you really were doing something illegal).

It really depends on what you're doing, there are no black and white answers. Record-keeping laws don't require a company to spend millions of dollars recording every penny (a few financial companies like banks aside). The concept is materiality, which has both quantitative and qualitative aspects, and can only truly be determined in the context of the situation.

Re:Going at this from the wrong angle

[YrWrstNtmr]

I've seldom ever seen a paper to electronic system work well.

Sure there are. Simple things, like vacation request forms. Previously, we had a 3-part form to be filled out. Assuming your request is approved, 1 copy gets forwarded/faxed to HR (in another city), 1 to your supv, and 1 back to you. Lots of paper moving around to get lost. And hard to find out exactly how many days you (or your division) have taken this year, and for what.

Replace that with a web- or Outlook forms-based solution. Always backed up on the LAN, and stored in a small DB. Access or MySQL would work here. Poof...no more paper. Biweekly, payroll brings up a relavent list of who's done what, eyeballs it to see if there are any really weird notations, and ports it into the actual payroll system. The first year, it eliminated 1000+ faxes/internal mailings, and many hours of payroll work.

Instant retrieval of a particular individuals transactions, be they requester or approver. Instant collation of the entire division or company's time off
"Hmmm...Division Y is our most profitable, AND they actually take the most time off per year per person. Maybe there's something to that."
"Director Z denies way too many requests. Maybe I should talk to him and see why."

HR, finance, and the Cxx level LOVED this.

Re:Going at this from the wrong angle

[Tower]

I think you are talking about something else... when the parent said "a paper to electronic system", that indicated to me paper originals that then become part of a digital use/transfer (such as paper receipts transferred in via scanning).

The vacation request form example that you gave is fundamentally different, since you control the original, and in that case it never exists in the digital domain. If the form was sitting in the supply room, you filled it out, then scanned it in, then that would be a more analagous situation.

sounds like a software problem

[william_w_bush]

buy a cheap serial card reader, plugged into a sff linux system, or embedded if possible (soekris would fit this). use ldap (possibly with activedirectory if a windows shop) or nis if you must to keep track of user directories. have the linux box poll the xerox's incoming directory and move the next file to appear. downside of this is you have to swipe your card every time you scan a page, but with some ingenuity you can get around this. move the incoming documents to ~bobsdir/scanned_documents/, and/or send an email to bob.

can use gs to filter the tiff/pdf into another format if you need, unix is nifty. all this is is a big bash script triggered by a small program polling on the card reader.

Re:sounds like a software problem

[Wescotte]

I've thought about doing something similar but it seems to have it's flaws.

The best method I could come up with is this. Each machine had a temp folder where it stores all scanned images before they are moved to the user folders. The image files are moved based on file creation timestamp. The user swipes their id card and a program notes who the user is, what machine they swiped their card on. This data stays valid until another user swipes their card. This will allow all images created after the swip to move to their user folder.

Now there are a few problems with this. First, I would have to maintain a list of what temp folder goes to what machine.. Not a HUGE problem but it's something to consider. Second, if a user doesn't swip their ID then all images they have scanned will be moved to the previous user's folder. Besides forcing a user to rescan documents this could be a potential security risk allowing somebody else access to documents they may not normally have access to.

I believe I need a piece of hardward that can limit the scanning capability to users who properly identify themselves before they scan a document.

Give Up Now

[coaxial]

You're trying to do the impossible. For at least 30 years, people have adovcated the "paperless office." It has reached a mythic status. It's just that: a myth. People always want to print. Hard copies allow annotations. Forms do not. Paper can be changed on the fly. Forms can not. Paper is portable. Forms are not. Even with laptops, you're still tied to the laptop. Paper can be folded up, and carried in pockets. Paper is collaborative. Computers aren't. Only one person can use a terminal. There's no rapid interaction among the group. That's why meetings and phone calls are still used even though email is practically ubiquitous.

Anyone that advocates rigid computer forms over flexible paper, doesn't understand how paper is used in society. I could go on and on, but there's no need. An entire book has already been written about this.

And before you anyone cries "luddite," the book was written by a cognitive psycologist at Hewlett-Packard, and a senior Microsoft researcher in interactive systems. Hardly luddites, and arguably an ironic position for them to take given their employment.

Re:Give Up Now

[gl4ss]

you didn't exactly state at all why it would be stupid to try to be paperless on certain things - and why it would suck to have the receipts scanned and attached to the electronical requests etc...

I don't think that he is trying to replace sketch paper or post-it notes, there's a lot of things usually that could be done via computer systems faster and easier than via using paper forms. It's a lot handier to manage an account directly through a program usually than it would be to keep it on paper, usually web based forms are more faster and easier to fill than paper forms as well, due to the form being able to check itself and give interactive instructions on what you should place where - and automatically get mailed or transferred to the right person or place.

paper isn't better for everything... but sure, it's not that useful to go entirely without it.

"Rather than pursue the ideal of the paperless office, we should work toward a future in which paper and electronic document tools work in concert and organizational processes make optimal use of both." so he should not give up.

Re:Give Up Now

[name773]

an in-office irc server would be kind of neat

or something like it...

they've tried to make online annotation methods collaborative with groupboards and the like, although on the whole i find that computers are clumsy for operating on most things other than typeable text (and maybe some simple image stuff)

Re:Give Up Now

[roseblood]

Yes, computers are clumsy for operating on things like photos and multimedia[NOT SAFE FOR WORK].

Re:Give Up Now

[Anonymous Coward]

agree with parent.

kpmg spent alot of money on this but not to do the impossible, to eliminate paper, but to achieve an admirable useful goal. duplicating and recording all transactions the company undertakes and archiving it digitally and instantly searchable, an endeavor bolstered, in part, by the enron/worldcom and arthur andersen debacle. its taken billions and many man years and its still difficult and not yet finished.

disclaimer: this is all hearsay from a random kpmg IT consultant here in the uk.

Re:Give Up Now

[anthony_dipierro]

Hard copies allow annotations. Forms do not. Paper can be changed on the fly. Forms can not. Paper is portable. Forms are not.

For internal purposes, most of this could be resolved using tablet PCs. It'd be quite expensive for every employee to have 2 or 3 tablet PCs, but not impossible.

Paper can be folded up, and carried in pockets.

A USB pendrive or whatever they're called can be carried in pockets.

Paper is collaborative. Computers aren't.

You've gotta be joking on this one. Computers have much more potential for collaboration than paper.

Anyone that advocates rigid computer forms over flexible paper, doesn't understand how paper is used in society.

Most people who advocate a "paperless" office don't really mean the elimination of all paper anyway. Electronic data has some definite advantages, and most businesses could benefit from moving a large portion of their paper documents to electronic form.

I work for a CPA firm, and we deal with a lot of paper, though we're moving toward using less of it. We spent an awful lot of time searching through file cabinets, searching within the folders in those file cabinets, and making photocopies of documents to put in those folders. We live in a level 2 flood zone, and should a hurricane hit us much of the paper would likely be ruined. Anyone who advocates not moving toward a paperless office doesn't use very much paper.

I agree that right now paper is expensive to eliminate completely (for internal use, and usually impossible to eliminate completely for external use). I think tablet PCs are a good alternative for many business uses. You can move them around on your desk, and you can write on them. The main problem is that they're so damn expensive. In order to be useful you really need at least two, because a common task is to compare two different documents side by side. Of course with good (and expensive) OCR software, this task tends to go away. Yeah, tablet PCs aren't flexible, but for office use that's not a huge deal.

Re:Give Up Now

[coaxial]

1. Tablet PCs aren't really ready for prime time. They're big. They're bulky. They have a limited battery. Interaction is clumsy. And they're expensive. Compare to paper which is thin. Easily distributable. (You can even effectively duplicate paper sometimes by tearing it in half.) Thin and light weight. Can be read on the scale of hundreds of years. Has a natural interaction, and very inexpensive for centuries. (As seen by the saying, "Not even worth the paper it's printed on.")

2. Yeah pen drives fit in a pocket, but you can't access them everywhere. Paper only requires only anything that can leave a stain or mark for write access, and at least one working eye and sufficient light for read access. Pen drives are comparitively expensive, and require an even more expensive device, that is in working order, to access.

3. Computers may have potential for collaboration, but it's just that. Potential. For many interactions their just too awkward. Have you ever tried to mark up revisions in a document? It's not that easy. You can leave notes in the margin. And when it comes for diagraming, it's incredibly slow. When was the last time you were explaining something to someone and said, "let me draw you a picture" and then fired up gimp?

It's hard to crowd around around a terminal. Paper is easy.

Paper has huge advantages, and it's stupid to ignore them simply because no one uses paper on Star Trek.

Re:Give Up Now

[oliverthered]

Tablet PCs aren't really ready for prime time. They're big. They're bulky. They have a limited battery. Interaction is clumsy. And they're expensive.

Look at PDA's, their cheep (Yeah pen drives fit in a pocket, but you can't access them everywhere.

Umm.. PDA's again?

Have you ever tried to mark up revisions in a document? It's not that easy. Doesn't your software do that for you automatically? If not switch to MS Office of wait for OpenOffice to implement document sharing.

When was the last time you were explaining something to someone and said, "let me draw you a picture" and then fired up gimp? I put a little bit of work into writing some good diagramming software for the PC, e.g. draw a squareish looking object and the software turns it into a square. For general drawing I've found graphics tablets to be quite good, and Corel draw is good for slightly more technical drawing (It has typeins), just don't touch Visio, it's a pile of unusable crap made to allow contractors to charge overtime for writing documents.

Re:Give Up Now

[coaxial]

PDAs
PDAs are expensive. A Palm Tungsteon costs at least $150. A piece of paper (assuming $4 for a ream) costs $0.008, that's less than a penny each. Have you ever given a way a PDA? I don't think so.

No USB drives aren't accessable anywhere, because they require you to bring your PDA. And not all PDAs will work. You need a PDA that has female USB-A port, as opposed to the much more common in portable, male USB-A port, or even mini male port. Also you need a PDA with software that is compatable with the file you're trying to read. If it's not, then you're screwed. Conversely, paper simply requires that you have at least one working eye.

Document Sharing
First, editors are not always authors. An editor marks a section as "awkward." An author rewrites it. An editor marks a section for expansion. An author actually expands the section. Editors have neither the time nor desire to do the author's job for him. Clearly marking defects in the middle of a sentence is incredibly difficult on a computer, compared to the old stand-by red pen.

You're remark about document sharing in MS Office and OpenOffice is comical. You obviously have never tried to use them in a real environment. Things get out of sync quickly. Especially if you're trying to merge two versions that are based off a common ancestor. The sharing only works for the most trivial changes. Most of the time, it causes much more trouble than what it's worth.

Trust me. I tried it before.

Drawing Software

I'm was talking about spur of the moment drawings. Not technical drawings for inclusion in documents. You would never use a piece of software or a $500 drawing tablet for these things. By the time you got the software launched and the tablet out and ready, the drawing could already be complete using a piece of paper and pencil that cost a nickle total.

Why did I wasting time with someone who obviously isn't even in high school yet. Now go. I think your mom is calling you.

Re:Give Up Now

[WedgeTalon]

1) Have you even LOOKED at tablet PC's in last few years? 2) You can access them anywhere that has a PC with a USB slot. Which is pretty much any office environment. 3) if you think collaboration on the PC is difficult, then you've never given it a fair shot. "Paper has huge advantages, and it's stupid to ignore them simply because no one uses paper on Star Trek." And PC's have even greater advantages, and it's stupid to ignore them simply because you get a hard-on looking at trees. Now STFU and go back under your bridge troll. :p

Re:Give Up Now

[oliverthered]

You need a PDA that has female USB-A port, as opposed to the much more common in portable, male USB-A port, or even mini male port.

Well, that's one of the problems with USB, but there are plenty of converters and cables with different USB ports on the end. I've never had problems connecting laptops to a network (even if that meant using a serial lead and slip/PCAnywhere)

you need a PDA with software that is compatible with the file you're trying to read. If it's not, then you're screwed. To some extent, but most people use software that's office compatible and there are plenty of viewers out their, with a computer you can relatively easily translate a document that's in french into an 'crude' English version, try doing that with paper.

Clearly marking defects in the middle of a sentence is incredibly
Bullshit, right click add comment.

You obviously have never tried to use them in a real environment.
I have, but based on your other problems, I very much suspect that the environment I was using them in was far more disciplined than they environment you were using them in. Trust me, I've done it on several occasions over several years at more than one company with different groups of people. You apparently have never succeeded in doing it.

You would never use a piece of software or a $500 drawing tablet for these things.
You can get a tablet for $50, if you have a PDA then the tablet is build in, no need to find pens that work, no need to sharpen pencils, no problems when you need more than one colour etc.... Don't forget when your working in a paperless environment you already have your tools at hand (or at least you should do) and an electronic copy costs a fraction of the cost of a piece of paper, an d you don't need a colour laser Xerox machine to replicate everything.

Why I waste my time.... (sorry getting a little childish there).

Re:Give Up Now

[eufaula]

the only time in history that there has been a paperless office is when we still wrote everything on clay tablets.

seriously -- we tried this at my previous employer with some fancy stuff from Ricoh (scanner, fax, print, copy and more tied to an ID card system. slick stuff, but i dont remember the name of the software package that went with it) and although we did cut on paper usage, there was still paper everwhere. the auditors for some reason _like_ paper.....

Re:Give Up Now

[bernywork]

I did some work with a company where everything that was possible to be paperless was. This wasn't to cut out the paper, it was to increase efficiency. The whole lot was a combination of web forms with notifications through email, and an approve function on a web site.

There was still a lot of paperwork that floated around the place, and a number of times, there was dual processes, one for paper and one for electronic.

All files of Travel and Expenditure were electronic, and then you printed out the result, and gave it to accounts with your receipts, the details for example went through the chain for approval. The receipts didn't have to go past everyone as enough information was in the electronic version for the managers to sign off.

Invoices for example couldn't only be sumbitted electronically, there were options so that a paper version came in, and it certainly helped your case if you lodged it online as well so that the approval could be done before the paper version came in. There were a number of times we were waiting on payment of invoices due to the fact that we had the invoice approved, but didn't have a paper version yet. This saved us the hassle of entering the details into the accountancy system.

Leave and other HR related functions were quite often completley electronic, as there was no requirement for paperwork in that instance. If you needed a doctor's certificate or otherwise, that was brought in, and it was given directly to HR.

What you really have to do is to look at what you are doing, and try to make those processes paper free, aim for efficiencies and not necessarily paperless. You will quite often find that both will go hand in hand.

Re:Give Up Now

[Wescotte]

Yes, that is exactly what I'm trying to do. Almost all our forms are simply created from a template in excel, printed out only to be reented by somebody in data entry. It really blows my mind how such a procedure ever was implimented.

Did you guys buy of this software or was it pretty much all custom written web based apps?

Re:Give Up Now

[bernywork]

It was all custom written. A lot of it was re-use of code, so it didn't take too long.

Scan reciepts? Are you nuts?

[Julian Morrison]

Confucius say: man who accept JPEG as reciept, soon find all office computer have "gimp" installed.

Re:Scan reciepts? Are you nuts?

[Wescotte]

Confucius say: man who accept JPEG as reciept, soon find all office computer have "gimp" installed

Scanning the receipts would simply be for filing puproses AFTER the original form is approved and processed.

I Can Do It...

[benjamindees]

Such a system can be put together using commodity hardware and open source software. It would be more customizable, longer-lived, and more affordable than anything from the "big name" solutions providers. With a little integration, it could be quite low-maintenance as well.

I've offered to do it for several years now for a few clients. Yet, none of them are large enough to pay "Xerox" prices or to justify the up-front costs by ordering more than a couple of systems. Also, it's difficult to find clients that truly recognize the benefits of a paperless office.

I'm amazed such a system doesn't exist already in an off-the-shelf form that can be customized. But, I've looked and such a thing doesn't exist.

Re:I Can Do It...

[planetmn]

You should try putting together your own off the shelf system. It sounds like a good idea to me. If you could implement the most common applications for a small-medium company in an easy to setup, plug it in and go system, you might be able to do it.

I've heard a lot of ideas for computer based products, but honestly, this sounds like a good one. Also, think about a particular market (law offices, medical offices, etc.). My uncle's medical practice spends a fortune on applications like this from larger vendors, and he's often asked me to put something together for him, and from talking at conferences, many other doctors are looking for the same type of thing.

Records management, time cards, expense reports, etc. would all be pretty universal needs I would think.

-dave

It Won't Work

[Ed Almos]

Let me save you the time and the money, it won't work. Three years ago my boss decided that the paperless office was the way to go and we spent a fortune on hardware.

1) Users complained about the extra work scanning incoming mail and invoices into the document management system.

2) Users still printed out paper copies of documents so that they could read them.

3) Despite a fortune spent on consultants auditors picked multiple holes in our system and almost refused to sign over the year-end accounts.

I forget who said it but the paperless office is about as likely as the paperless toilet, get used to it.

Ed Almos

Re:It Won't Work

[anthony_dipierro]

Users complained about the extra work scanning incoming mail and invoices into the document management system.

What we need is for every office to have a robotic set of hands. But in the mean time, there should really only be one (or a few) manual laborers complaining about scanning in documents. Everyone else should have their documents already scanned in.

Users still printed out paper copies of documents so that they could read them.

I have to admit that this one takes a lot of money to resolve. Dual monitors help a little. Tablet PCs are probably the best, for now.

Despite a fortune spent on consultants auditors picked multiple holes in our system and almost refused to sign over the year-end accounts.

That one seems odd. Most major auditors pretty much *require* data to be submitted in electronic form.

Re:It Won't Work

[dasunt]

I forget who said it but the paperless office is about as likely as the paperless toilet, get used to it.

If you ever visit some parts of the world, you are going to have a big surprise...

Re:It Won't Work

[Anonymous Coward]

But what about the shells method in demolition man????????

Re:It Won't Work

[Ruarris]

I forget who said it but the paperless office is about as likely as the paperless toilet, get used to it.

Apparently this guy's never used this

Here you go...

[Anonymous Coward]

This system is similar to the Xerox while offering what you want. You combine the Canon with this desktop software to manage the scanning and this makes it all searchable and stuff. Talk to your Canon rep about a card reader for access control and you're done.

Good luck.

HP Digital Sender

[metamatic]

Sends the scans as PDF to the e-mail address chosen, via SMTP.

Re:HP Digital Sender

[Wescotte]

Right now we have the ability to store images to any folder on the network (that is writable), FTP or via email. However having a large number of usings it's not exactly easy to select where you want them to go. Each location must be typed in via touchpad.. Entering an email address just takes too long

Re:HP Digital Sender

[wik]

The digital sender has autocomplete and you can specify short names for common email addresses. There's no reason to enter the whole address.

Stapler

[Anne_Nonymous]

>> I've made it my personal mission to get rid of as much paper as I can.

You just want an excuse to take away my stapler, don't you?

Paperless Office

[nurb432]

Heh, i remember when that term was first coined, and then promptly printed and posted on the office bulletin board.

multiple holes in our system

[oliverthered]

That's your problem, had any of you consultants actually worked in, with or created a paperless office before?

I thought not, come back an say it's impossible when your not dealing with idiots.

If I were designing a 'paperless office' I would keep information given to me by other companies in it's original format unless there was a really good reason for scanning it in. I would also try to get the companies I dealt with to issue electronic invoices etc...

The only reason people were printing out documents to read is because there not used to reading things on a monitor, ditch the printers and get some nice clear monitors, in a few months everyone will be able to read from a monitor (make sure that they can copy and annotate the document too) and most of your problems will vanish.

If you need to move documents around PDA's are reasonable if you need to amend the document and USB keys are good for carrying them around, you can also encrypt the data on the USB key so you don't have the problems with data protection that you get with paper.

If you need people to collaborate then you can setup exchange to share data between people with ACL's and design forms and macros that allow people to communicate and work on ideas in real time, and you also get the benefits of a full history etc..

Basically, I wouldn't go for 100% paperless, that would be a nightmare, but you should try to remove paper from the system wherever possible and gain the benefits that electronic media provides; tracking, security, low cost, easy to reproduce and edit etc...

I've worked more-or-less paperless for the past few years and have helped setup tightly intergrated paperless systems based around Microsoft Exchange. The last time I used a piece of paper was a couple of weeks ago, it was 5cm graph paper and I used it to measure something.

A manager at my company once said....

[barzok]

"You will see a paperless bathroom before a paperless office."

In the several years since he said that, I think our paper usage has been increasing significantly.

Not likely

[Anonymous Coward]

I work in a public tech support environment where customers always say "Wow, you guys sure use a lot of paper, considering the business you're in."

Receipts. Repair Paperwork. The customer needs to sign something to approve the work, and having them sign a Palm seems silly. Hard copies are traceable, we've seen the response to "paper-less" voting systems.

And unless you're going to produce, manufacture, market and sell your product yourself, chances are the businesses/vendors you work with will also be using paper.

Suck it up, paper ain't going anywhere.

Re:Not likely

[seawall]

> we've seen the response to "paper-less" voting systems

Clueless widespread adoption by the powers-that-be with widespread grassroots resistance (more effective in the office than in voting I expect)?

Sounds like a good business to be in to me: Lots of customers who buy but don't pesky up your life by actually using your product!

Re:Paperless

[GraemeDonaldson]

Save the trees!

:-)

One word....

[Overzeetop]

Washlet

Don't try to go "all the way"...

[cr0sh]

As others have noted, this is an impossible task, simply because the technology isn't there yet (if we had something like e-ink "paper" coupled with a touch-sensitive layer to simulate paper with electronic notation - a tablet like this that was very inexpensive - heck, still probably wouldn't be good enough), plus dealing with all the incoming paper will be impossible.

At the last company I worked for, I was the lead developer of an in-house developed CRM and problem tracking system. Most people loved the system - it was fast, it was convenient, it handled certain billing aspects, had reporting on critical information, the problem tracking software was fairly nice (we had several clients ask if we were selling it - we weren't). Even so, people couldn't let go of the paper on the problem tracking system. A job would come in, it would be entered, and then printed out, then "passed around".

This wasn't necessary, though - the job could be "transferred" (with email notification to both parties and the client) between parties working on it, all time would be entered on the job, with a full history of who did what when. We allowed for "annotations" to the job, you could add "attachments" to the job (basically any file you had on your personal workstation or on the network) - which would "follow" the job around. Even so, people insisted on putting notes on the paper - and invariably, this would cause problems...

Every day, you would get an email or hear someone say "Has anyone seen job #xyz? I gave it to Bob yesterday, but he doesn't have it, he can't find it", etc. I used to wonder to myself "Duh, if you had left it completely electronic, this wouldn't be an issue" - I even on a number of occasions asked people why they did this - managers, programmers, others who worked with the job - to see if I could come up with an electronic solution...

Annotations were one thing, which got added in short order - basically as an attachment that could be "quick entered" - click the "Add Note" button, and a text editor would be openned which when the "save" button was clicked, would tack on the note as an attachment. This got used quite a bit, but things were still being passed around. A bit of discussion revealed that what they really were having problems with were screen prints faxed or emailed after the job was created. These were printed out, and stapled or clipped to the paper job as it was passed around. Sometimes, this stuff got unclipped, lost, thrown away - it was a nightmare to track. So we tried to come up with a solution. We created "scanning stations".

These were two machines (in a trial run) set up with cheapo Visioneer scanners (actually, they were pretty nice scanners), with a very simple desktop - the user would log-in with the scanning station login/password, the desktop had a single icon, which read "scan attachment". Clicking on this icon the user would launch a simple application which allowed them to log into the job tracking system (so it knew who scanned the attachment), select the job number to attach the scan to, then put the page on the scanner and click "scan" - once the scan was complete, the image would be attached to the job as an attachment, and they could log out, or scan another document.

We had plans and ideas of moving the "scanning" to the client end - so that they could log into our website, enter the job number, upload the image, and have it "auto-attach" to the job. We had ideas of using a fax server to automate the attachment of fax scans to the jobs (using OCR for Forms to detect a "written in" job number on the fax cover sheet or something). We even had an idea of hooking the phone system up so that a client could call in a problem, enter the job number in (or create a new job), speak the problem into the phone, capture the WAV file, create an MP3, and attach that to the job (voice clip attachment).

Even so - even if we had implemented all of that (I don't know of a solution that even does any of that last part - maybe Peoplesoft or something) - I still think people would have passed around paper...

Not impossible, sort of.

[o-hayo]

You'll never be 100% paperless. We've been pushing paperless for 3 years now, and we've made awesome progress. Anyone that tells you its ridiculous or impossible has either never tried it OR maybe their line of business wouldn't benifit from it. For us it is a huge improvement because we don't have to ship paperwork around the office (not to mention the nation) and the amount of things getting lost is almost down to zero.

Aside from that, I'll give you some advice that we've learned from doing this. If you're lucky, the way your scanners work is they send the data to the software using an anonymous FTP account. Ours sends each page as a seperate TIFF file, along with some metadata in an xml file (don't be surprised if the xml is ridiculously dirty) and then some type of "I'm Done Now" empty file. Your best bet is to start up your favorite network scanner, ethereal or whatever, and play around with the transactions between this software and the scanner. Put the packets together using the Follow TCP Stream and you'll see how they interact. We decided to basically pretend to be the software and coded our own services and application to do all the work, giving us a tremendous amount of control with what happened to all the virtual paper.

I've seen paperless solutions in place at other companies in our sector, so I know why most people laugh when they hear "paperless" - especially with how much solution providers charge for their software. But if you have a software team or even just one programmer with a clue you can build something a thousand times better and more suitable for your business (our software integrates with all our other applications seamlessly, it would have been nearly impossible to do that with a packaged product for sure).

Re:Not impossible, sort of.

[Wescotte]

Yes, our Xerox machines have the ability to send the TIFF (or PDF) files via FTP. You have the option ot overwrite, abort if file/folder exists, or rename. Now with a PDf it just creates file.pdf but with TIFFs it creates a folder of the name you specify and puts all the TIFFs in it with a text file containing a list of all the presets the user selected during the scanning process.

The problem I can't seem to get past is determing where to store the files. If we have a large public folder where all scans go it will be a nightmare to find your document you just scaned. It sounds like we have a similar system. Could you elaborate on how you overcame these types of problems?

Re:Not impossible, sort of.

[o-hayo]

Use SQL to index the metadata (info from the text file) and lock down the storage (some kind of NAS is easy) so its anything *but* public. This lets you easily manipulate categorization and security of the documents too.

DJVU

[twistedcubic]

Consider using DJVU instead of PDF for scanned documents. You'll get much better size and much faster rendering. It makes a huge difference for me with my relatively small number of documents compared to an office.

Re:DJVU

[metamatic]

Yes, but disk space is cheap, and I'd rather have searchable documents.