Date: February 23, 2009

GOT PAPER? New Grassroots Movement Promotes the Paperless Office through GREEN, Efficient and PAPERLESS Processes

Is there such thing as the paperless office?

Many agree that technology has not evolved enough to provide complete paperless office environments. Many states still require wet, hard copy signatures on legally binding documents, and the technology to sign documents via a thin-client, non-peripheral appliance is not available yet. The nature of handling, commenting and routing physical paper is comfortable to most office workers, rather than annotating electronically. These obstacles significantly reduce the adoption of the paperless office, with most cultures not looking to change processes that have been in place forever.

“Over the past thirty years, many people have proclaimed the imminent arrival of the paperless office. Yet even the World Wide Web, which allows almost any computer to read and display another computer's documents, has increased the amount of printing” The Myth of the Paperless Office, Abigail J. Sellen and Richard H. R. Harper.

“I have never believed a business can be truly 100% paperless, it’s just not convenient or possible at this point in time. However, there are many processes and/or departments that can absolutely be made paperless. For instance, Accounts Payable, medical billing, proof of delivery tickets or sales order automation are a few areas that we focus on with great success. These processes can be automated where no paper is handled or keyed, with the same if not better accuracy than manual typing. With the concept of departmental or business process paperless initiatives, we set out to educate the business community about going paperless with realistic goals,” explains Brent Wesler, VP of Business Development, Square 9 Softworks

The Paperless Project is a grassroots coalition of companies focused on transforming the way organizations work with paper and electronic content. The Paperless Project’s Go GREEN Initiative concentrates on reducing a company’s carbon footprint as well as paper usage through the use of content management and imaging technologies.

With between 70-85% of an organization’s processes still being managed on paper, the GO GREEN Initiative specifically identifies common paper intensive processes and converts them to automated workflows. The Paperless Project’s GO GREEN initiative looks to create business efficiencies and reduce America’s reliance on paper based transaction processing.

“Contributing companies have a vested interest to expose to the public technologies now available to reduce or negate paper-based processes. Businesses just have no clue that some of these robust solutions are out there, so we decided to get back to basics with an initiative everyone understands, paper”, explains Wesler.

Organizations of all sizes are tasked with managing heavy paper and electronic content processes and departments. Paper has long been a requirement to comply with federal compliance mandates, track and audit activities, approve and review business operations. Paper, and now electronic content, is at the center of everything we do. Imaging and conversion toolkit vendor Snowbound realizes the benefit of focusing on green initiatives to support their sales process.

“We are honored to join The Paperless Project’s efforts to educate organizations on the importance of reducing their carbon footprint as well as help to transform their processes to attain this goal. Many organizations rely on Snowbound Software as an integral part of their paperless strategy. Both our Imaging and Conversion SDKs as well as Document and Image Viewers eliminate traditional paper-based workflow tasks, increase throughput, and enhance the user’s experience”, explains William Martin, Director of Business Development, Snowbound Software

Square 9 Softworks, the co-founder of The Paperless Project, worked with Durst Corporation, a manufacturing company out of Cranford, NJ, to embrace electronic document management (EDM) to reduce lost sales orders with the purchase of SmartSearch, a Microsoft .Net based, document and imaging system. Before turning to SmartSearch to manage orders electronically, Durst was awash in hard-to-handle fax paper sales orders that stuck together, slipped behind file cabinets, slid under fax machines or “hid” in desks – out of sight. What do you tell customers who ask “Hey, did you get my order?” Equally frustrating, Durst had no way to determine the number or type of orders pending and where to allocate resources accordingly.

“SmartSearch met the challenge of lost orders,” says Chris Pike, Chief Operating Officer of Durst Corporation. “Now orders are filed electronically in SmartSearch and most of the paper is gone. And the SmartSearch solution allows us to be nimble – an important factor in our success. With SmartSearch, we can accurately measure sales order volume, track orders quickly and push out next day deliveries.”

Companies will spend millions on improving legacy software packages that never address the number one bottleneck, Paper. Paper is the only common, standard communication method that is socially accepted across the world. Everything progresses over time - why shouldn’t business paper-based processes evolve as well?

The New York firm of Brady, McGuire and Steinberg was no exception to evolving from their storage dilemma. This Hastings on the Hudson practice which specializes in Union Labor law was fortunate to rent storage space in the basement of its building but retrieving document still required considerable time and effort.

Office Manager Beverly Casado did her best to maintain a well organized paper based filing system which included filing each case by its client name and matter number into a box which was then tracked using a Lotus 1-2-3 spreadsheet. When a file was required, the administrator would look up the matter number in the spread sheet find out what box it was archive in and then head to the basement. Even under the most optimal circumstances, this process still took a minimum of 10 minutes to locate the file. Then the file was brought upstairs where the required section was copied before being re-filed back down in the basement. That was before SmartSearch however.

With the help of Square 9 Softworks partner Connecticut Business Systems, Ms. Casado now digitally images each closed case file into SmartSearch from their multifunctional printer. “Now it is so much easier with SmartSearch, Ms. Casado states. “We simply enter the matter number or client name into SmartSearch and the document is available immediately. I just print out the pages I need and I’m finished.”

With current closed files now in check, Ms. Casado is focused on eliminating the files currently in storage. Boxes are being pulled from the basement whenever time allows and scanned into SmartSearch. Despite this not being a daily event, several hundred case files are now digitally archived with as many as 40 new files captured in a given day. In addition, as documents are requested, they are now being scanned and shredded rather than being returned to the basement. The Law Offices of Brady, McGuire and Steinberg, Durst Corporation and many others have invested in managing their critical information.

“Many companies will invest thousands and millions in managing financial assets, HR systems, but with 85% of data still contained within paper, many are not willing to evolve to document management yet, which is puzzling”, remarks Wesler.

“Over the last 50 years, technology has EVOLVED the typical ‘office’ from the advent of the index card, typewriter, PC, word processing programs to now, artificial intelligence software that automates data entry. Our business environment is changing and quickly, with labor costs skyrocketing, federal mandates on compliance getting stricter and information access across the world more important. We see more mainstream adoption of document management, but we find it’s mostly attributed towards simplifying the sales approach to the lowest common denominator, paper-based processes,” comments Wesler

The Paperless Project addresses the need for a self-education site that teaches rather than pushes products. The Paperless Project is an initiative sponsored by Square 9 Softworks, a manufacturer of document management and imaging software to start to address the evolution of paper and content. InfiNet Business Systems, the systems integrator division of Square 9, in conjunction with vendors such as Fujitsu, Microsoft, Kofax, Paradatec and Snowbound have aligned to create The Paperless Project, a back to basics initiative that is current and timely.

For more information about The Paperless Project please contact Brent Wesler, 203-789-8791 ext.119 or pr@thepaperlessproject.com