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

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.

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.

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