Capturing
Indexing
Storing
Retrieving
Searching
Managing the Project
Summary
Going "paperless" is easy! Hire a company to scan all of your paper documents, place them onto digital media and then remove all printers from the office.
No more paper.
Actually, a paperless environment is like nirvana—while it does not really exist in this world, dealing with "less paper" is alive and well. However, less paper and paperless initiatives come with a difficult task. How will you ever find anything in your electronic files without a knowledge management solution that helps organize, index, and manage the documents? How will you know what and when to ultimately destroy after your record retention period runs out if you cannot track the documents meeting these requirements?
Paperless is all about using technology to improve efficiency, but it's also about people and processes. Take this opportunity to change behavior and the procedures you use. But, people do what they are comfortable doing—and change is hard. To get the most out of a significant document management project, take a critical look at what you currently do, and think about how that can change as you move to a paperless or less paper environment.
Capturing
The first step is to transfer paper documents to electronic file formats. At the same time, you may want to consider asking your customers, clients, and vendors to send you electronic files, such as purchase orders, invoices, payments and statements, for example, instead of paper documents.
Without much effort many common business applications, including accounting applications, allow you to save files and reports in an electronic format. If you want to maintain reports that come from these applications, choose to send the output to a PDF file rather than to a printer. Otherwise, consider using "print preview" as you analyze the reports, and then discard those you do not need to save. Electronic report files take up little space compared to their paper counterparts.
For the rest of the paper you generate, whether from documents sent by customers and clients, those you must print out or are faxed to you, you will need to scan them into an electronic format. For this task, it is essential that you have a selection of multi-sheet, high-speed scanners available within your company.
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Indexing and File Naming
Indexing and file naming are critical to the success of a paperless digital implementation. Working in the paperless environment, it's not what you save as much as how you find the information once it goes onto the storage media. Easy retrieval is key to the success of any paperless initiative.
If you can easily find files on your own computer, it is probably because you have set up a series of folders to help you organize the files, and use file names you can easily recognize as you browse through the folders. In paperless environments, the more consistent the indexing and file naming structure, the easier it is to find any file, regardless of whether the files are on your own computer or included in a comprehensive document management system.
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Storing
Storing electronic files are relatively inexpensive compared to the cost of storing comparable boxes full of paper documents at a warehouse facility. In addition, electronic files can be accessed from anywhere, anytime, by those with proper authorization. But just because such storage is cheap does not mean you should save and store everything.
Space requirements grow exponentially as a company or organization adopts and embraces a digital environment. Take the time to set up policies and procedures that provide guidance as to what should, and, maybe more importantly, what should not be saved, and for how long. Many document management systems even tag electronic files with dates for destruction, automatically deleting files at a set time.
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Retrieving
If all of your files are electronically stored, and you need to find a copy of an invoice/ cancelled check from six months ago to prove you paid a bill, how will you find it? There are no more boxes of paper records filed by vendor name or number. Retrieval is facilitated through your indexing and file naming structure so that files are organized by vendor, client, or other categories. In addition, sticking with a structure every time, adds to the efficiency of retrieving just what you want. If you were diligent in this process, you should be able to easily retrieve the documentation. If not, good luck.
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Searching
Good search functionality is vital to the success of a paperless filing system. Once a document is created, you have to be able to find it!
Searching for electronic files is a task each of us undertakes every day. There are several well-known search engines that can search within files for key words, phrases, or tags. The engine displays a set of the results, from which you can choose the right document.
Perhaps the naming and indexing standards you adopt can include key words and phrases in the file name, index, or in the header of the file. In addition, you may want to add metadata tags to the files to make them easier to find.
While you can search certain documents for words and phrases, this is not possible with scanned documents—unless you convert them with OCR (optical character recognition) software. Otherwise, they are just pictures of the files. Applications like Adobe Acrobat Standard allow you to manage OCR scanned files, or those printed to PDF, and to annotate them so that they can be searched just like those documents saved as text or html files.
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Managing the Project
No matter what technology or tools you use to facilitate paperless processes, every implementation needs to be managed by an owner, a champion and a data manager. The owner is the person who has ultimate responsibility for the data. The champion is the person(s) who leads the way by words and deeds, and gets others excited about the process. The data manager is responsible for the maintenance and continuity of the data. While the names or descriptions of these three roles might change from one organization to another, the management process should not be overlooked or ignored.
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Summary
Paperless digital technologies are simply enablers that depend on people for their successful implementation, usage and management. Successful use of these technologies depends on setting up and diligently following standard policies and procedures for capturing, indexing, storing and retaining electronic documents. The paperless office is spearheaded by people, maintained by processes and procedures and aided by technologies.
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