The Paperless Office Promise

When Personal Computers first started appearing in the mid 80’s, the big promise was that they would reduce paper consumption and waste. What has happened instead is that computers have inadvertently caused us to consume, waste and archive more paper than ever before. It is easy to understand why… in the old days, if you made a typo with your Underwood, you merely corrected it with White-Out. You wouldn’t bother typing the whole document again, that would be a terrible waste of time (vs. waste of paper). Your typed document had sweat value. Once done it was the only copy, there were no wasteful photocopiers in the old days, so your original had to get the job done.

Today, you would correct the typo on your computer and then reprint it. Because it is so easy, you might do this 2 or 3 times before you finally decide that the document is perfect, and the first 2 or 3 drafts wind up in our overflowing landfills (along with all those expired laser and inkjet cartridges). Computer technology has made us more wasteful than ever before.

Laserfiche, Xerox and other companies, are attempting to change all this with “paperless office” solutions, the primary components being specialized software combined with scanners. The idea is that all incoming paper documents are immediately converted to electronic documents, then shredded. The scanned documents are then archived electronically into logically named folders which are searchable. All documents produced in-house are stored in similar searchable folders, and are not printed unless required.

When implemented in a large company with, for example, 100 employees, the benefits are compelling. Let’s imagine Sally needs to fetch a document and send it to a client; in the old days, she walks across the room, or perhaps down a hallway to another room, confronts a huge collection of filing cabinets, and starts searching for her document. After 15 minutes of searching she finds it, she walks back down the hallway to the copy room and makes a copy. Then she either mails or faxes the document to the client, then returns the original to its location in the complex filing room. In the paperless office, she would never have to leave her desk. She could perform a Boolean search and find the document instantly, then either fax or email it from her PC, without ever handling a piece of paper, fax machine, copier, envelope or stamp. Not only that, she has saved a great deal of time and therefore has made herself a far more efficient employee.

Of course, the true paperless office is not possible, at least not yet. The client receives his requested document from Sally and immediately prints it. But the benefit from Sally’s point of view is easy to measure; she is more efficient, and so are the other employees in her office. The need to dedicate an entire room to document storage has been eliminated too, thereby reducing rent costs. The only caveat is that a paperless office must run on an absolutely bullet-proof network that is reliable and always backed up, and as we all know, the reliability of computers and networks is questionable, often requiring a full-time IT staff to keep them functioning. Does this factor outweigh the advantages? Time will tell, if the trend towards a paperless office continues to gain momentum.

Thanks to Carol Williams from Ikon for providing information about LaserFiche document management solutions.