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

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: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.

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...