The idea of a paperless office has long been spoken about. With high-speed scanners and Multi-Functional Peripherals (MFP’s) becoming more affordable, and the need to ensure that documents can easily be found and reproduced, more offices are scanning their original documents and storing them electronically.
In the past few years, software in the Optical Character Recognition (OCR) industry has matured immensely and the creation of full text searchable documents means that there is minimal Metadata (data that describes data) required to be entered when saving a document.
Every company has some sort of file plan structure where they store their electronic documents. It might be a “My Documents” folder, a Shared folder on a Server, or a Document / Records Management solution. Printed documents can be placed in a physical location, but to find the document electronically can be quite a task if you have not saved the document as a full-text searchable document with enough metadata to find it easily when doing a search when the document is being saved, and placed in one of the folders on your file plan.
So a good idea to not only facilitate fast searches of documents, but to also do your bit for a Green environment, is to think before printing any document that does not for instance, need a signature. By doing this, not only will the amount of paper generated in your organisation be reduced, the savings in storage space, paper, ink and other consumables will result in considerable cost savings to your company.
One of the big challenges in achieving the paperless office is that all staff needs to buy into the idea of not printing everything. This change in the way they work is critical to getting them to embrace the idea of not having to print every item that is created, but only those that are needed, for example invoices or contract.
The paperless office is meant to describe the office of the future, but the future is now and it will be well worthwhile ensuring that all your staff “think before they ink”!