... designing a scanned document system customized for invoice storage. it works perfectly and is exactly what the customer wanted but it exposed a major issue with any kind of scanned document management system... organizing some kind of lookup system for the files that actually allows you to locate the document you want quickly and easily. in my case I get a data feed from the invoicing software to correlate with scans that are automatically named with the invoice number. there in lies the reason it works so well... the data for lookup is already keyed in during the normal generation of invoices. no additional man-hours are needed to key in scanned document specific information for later lookup and retreival. yes we have to manually feed the actual invoices into a document scanner (so we can capture signatures that were added post-invoice printing) but the number of man-hours it takes for that is orders of magnitude less than it took to manually sort and file each day's invoices... not to mention later retrieval. we're talking thousands of invoices a day also.
the other place I've had success with going mostly paper-less has been in certain law firms where they receive their "faxes" as PDFs (through an eFaxing service) as well as scan in large case documents. the reason it works for them is they're scanning at most 1 to 2 large-sized documents for archival storage a day so the manual task of naming and filing those scans isn't a huge task.
in the end being totally paperless is a nearly impossible task right now, but you can do things to lower your tree-killing count.:)
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... designing a scanned document system customized for invoice storage. it works perfectly and is exactly what the customer wanted but it exposed a major issue with any kind of scanned document management system... organizing some kind of lookup system for the files that actually allows you to locate the document you want quickly and easily. in my case I get a data feed from the invoicing software to correlate with scans that are automatically named with the invoice number. there in lies the reason it works so well... the data for lookup is already keyed in during the normal generation of invoices. no additional man-hours are needed to key in scanned document specific information for later lookup and retreival. yes we have to manually feed the actual invoices into a document scanner (so we can capture signatures that were added post-invoice printing) but the number of man-hours it takes for that is orders of magnitude less than it took to manually sort and file each day's invoices... not to mention later retrieval. we're talking thousands of invoices a day also. the other place I've had success with going mostly paper-less has been in certain law firms where they receive their "faxes" as PDFs (through an eFaxing service) as well as scan in large case documents. the reason it works for them is they're scanning at most 1 to 2 large-sized documents for archival storage a day so the manual task of naming and filing those scans isn't a huge task. in the end being totally paperless is a nearly impossible task right now, but you can do things to lower your tree-killing count. :)