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.

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.

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.

Scan reciepts? Are you nuts?

[Julian Morrison]

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

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.

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?

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...