Scan4News Gazette
October 2005


Road to a Paperless Office

All organisations over the years have always communicated using paper documents.  As technology has evolved the communication has become faster and easier, yet we still produce more paper documents than ever before.  The majority of these paper documents being stored in filing cabinets, Arch Lever files, archive boxes and compactus units.

Once upon a time there were filing clerks or junior office assistants that their tasks were to store the paper documents into the relevant filing receptacle.  As technology invaded the office environment, the filing clerk's position disappeared, and the responsibility of filing was moved to the relevant position eg supplier invoices to accounts payable, sales orders to sales administrator. What has evolved, as any organisation grew, is that each division created their own set of hard-copy files that were in no-way cross-referenced with any other division's files.  When there was a customer inquiry it takes days of staff searching in the various files to find all the information that is related to the inquiry both electronically and through the hard-copy filing system.

Kahn & Blair notes the effect in the book "Information Nation" where they highlight a very interesting point "Total Cost of Failure".  This turns the common practice of Total Cost of Ownership for calculating the economic impact of taking an action on its head.  As Total Cost of Failure (TCF) is the economic impact of failing to take action. The typical economic impacts are:
  1. Inconvenience to business
  2. Lost employee time
  3. Loss of Customer confidence
  4. Loss of organisational capabilities
  5. Lost business & business opportunities
  6. Court imposed penalties and/or sanctions
  7. Regulator penalties and closer scrutiny
  8. Business failure

They must not be considered separately as each item has a cause and effect on any one of the other items.  They all have a relative cost in business and can have a greater impact in the longevity of your company.

What can I do about it?

The simplest solutions are always the best.  Establish a policy to digitise your hard-copy documents into TIF (Tagged Information Format) files as legal copies, and PDF (Portable Document format) files for ease of access.  Create an index of all these documents into textual database and link the index to either the PDF and/or TIF files for easy retrieval, viewing, printing, e-mail and faxing.   The approach is to digitise from the present or start of the current fiscal year and continue the process daily, weekly, monthly or quarterly dependent upon the volume of paper.  Establish a backlog fund to digitise the critical business documents (tax records, agreements, contracts, policy & procedures, investments, joint ventures, employee files, research & development, etc) from the previous 2-3 years.

Now your next customer inquiry, business deal or audit can be dealt with quickly and simply with no loss of employee time or customer confidence.

For assistance contact Scan2Archive by using the click here or call 1300 789 684

The web iste with the lastest on Scanning http://www.scan2archive.com.au

Monthly Newsletter - register to become a member of the Scan4News Gazette monthly Newsletter by simply entering the request in our contact form Click Here.