Getting Paper Under Control

"Less paper, not paperless," is the phrase Carol Conway of Computer Rescue Squad uses to describe the move toward electronic document management. In fact, skeptics have suggested that the likelihood of achieving a paperless office is right up there with achieving a paperless bathroom. But, for the average business in Southwest Florida, controlling out of control paper is not only possible but also affordable. You can go from a cluttered mountain of paper files to a variety of electronic solutions and realize a rapid return on the investment needed to make that happen.

We all hoped that personal computers would bring an end to the scourge of paper documents that file our file drawers and litter our desktops. No such luck! Less than one percent of organizations in Southwest Florida are using state of the art tools for electronic document management. For most of our filing solutions, we are back at the turn of the last century.

PCs Haven't Solved the Paper Problem

PCs have certainly provided astonishing productivity gains for businesses of every size. This is particularly true for small companies. In our case, we can publish a monthly magazine and maintain a daily website (www.businessnewsnow.com) without needing a large staff and time-consuming manual systems to maintain our circulation and advertising files. We are digitally driven by powerful but inexpensive PCs and intuitive software.

But, we are not state of the art in terms of electronic document management. We don't really have a formal system for storing and indexing the hundreds of stories and story elements-such as photos and graphs-that we use in the course of preparing our print and online publications. Moreover, we still take in, send out and store reams of paper documents. We receive dozens and dozens of faxed and mailed press releases each week. Many of these can serve as useful background information for future articles -- if only we could store and organize them efficiently. We also maintain an informal "morgue" of newspaper and magazine clippings on issues that we will need to reference in the future. In addition, we maintain paper files of our advertising contracts along with relevant correspondence and lots of miscellaneous financial info.

Where is that darn file?

In short, we are only two years old and have already accumulated much too much paper. I shudder at the thought of the volume of documents we will need to manage over the next five to 10 years.

* Will we need the equivalent of an entire office to store everything?

* With all those paper files, how quickly will we be able to find what we need?

* Will we need to consider off-site storage?

* When the inevitable hurricane hits, how are we going to safeguard our mission critical documents?

Many organizations and departments are much more paper intensive than are we: lawyers, doctors, architects, engineers, builders, government agencies, and recruitment firms. You know who you are.

If you are storing everything on site, you may be paying $20-30/square foot for file space. Just because it's nearby doesn't mean it's easy to find. Finding a typical paper file requires 5 to 10 minutes of someone's very expensive time.

If you are keeping important files offsite, you undoubtedly find it time-consuming and/or expensive to retrieve files when you need them -- probably five minutes after you've moved them. It may take half a day to get the wrong file back. You may be wasting a valuable employee's time or paying $30 per retrieval to someone else. And, if you need it after hours or on the weekend, you may be temporarily out of luck.

Light at the End of the Paper Tunnel

Happily, there are solutions available locally that fit the pocket book of even the smallest business. The rewards are immediate and obvious:

* Reduce the amount of space devoted to files

* Reduce the cost of onsite and/or offsite storage and retrieval

* Improve retrieval of documents from minutes or hours to seconds

* Provide a secure electronic format for storage of paper files

The result: saving space, saving time, saving clients, saving money.

It is possible to convert an office full of files to one or more CDs. In the case of Computer Rescue Squad, they estimate that they have been able to store 60 square feet of files electronically on two CDs. In an even more dramatic example, the Collier County property appraiser's department was able to reclaim four entire offices by moving from paper to electronic storage.

But the value of electronic document management transcends the issue of space. The ability to find and retrieve files within seconds provides the biggest return. A number of products enable users to scan, index, store and convert to text a wide variety of documents-from pure text to photos and graphic images such as CAD drawings. The ability to find client-related documents such as an invoice, a contract or an architectural drawing within seconds can be critical to delivering world-class customer service.

Depending on your needs, you can spend several hundred dollars for a low-end scanner and software to the mid-five figures for a state of the art PC-based solution. Even at the higher end, however, you can expect a rapid return on investment if you have an extensive set of files and documents that need to be retrieved quickly and regularly.

When you don't need real-time access to all of your files, there is an appealing hybrid solution available from Total Recall in Naples. We will explore this solution in more detail next month, but, briefly, Total Recall will store your files inexpensively offsite, organize them electronically, provide you with an electronic index, and scan only those documents you request. You use the Internet to search for documents, to request them and to retrieve them after they have been scanned electronically. Documents are available within an hour of the first request and instantly afterwards.

The Bottom Line: It's time to rethink the way you are probably handling documents in order to operated at peak efficiency.

Next Month: We'll examine some available solutions in detail and illustrate how local organizations are using them.