In 1981, New Jersey CPA David Casey founded the Construction Financial Management Association (CFMA) to provide a forum for gathering and exchanging ideas as well to provide educational programs for construction finance professionals.  CFMA has since transformed from a small regional association into a national organization with over 7,000 members including general contractors, subcontractors, developers, construction managers, architects, engineers, and suppliers.

Each year CFMA hosts a conference and exhibition bringing together thousands of like-minded construction finance professionals for several days of education, sharing, and camaraderie.  The conference features educational classes through CFMA’s Schools of Learning in addition to showcased speakers and exhibit booths displaying the hottest products and technologies driving the industry forward.  This year’s CFMA 2009 Conference is being held May 16th through May 20th  at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas – the site of the original CFMA national conference in 1982.

A prevailing theme to this years’ CFMA conference is the need for builders to address the exponential growth in electronic and paper file management involved with construction.  Files include emails, invoices, drawings, insurance records, certification of completions, permits, and more.  The mountain of paperwork required for an average construction project can fill up an entire trailer.   Unfortunately this paperwork robs profits by consuming resources for filing documents, retrieving them, and storage costs.  It also exposes companies to the risk of eDiscovery litigation.

ColumbiaSoft is attending this year’s CFMA conference as an exhibitor demonstrating Document Locator, a paperless office solution for construction companies.  Paperless office solutions, also known as document management solutions, offer construction companies many capabilities.   Document Locator digitally archives paper documents, electronically stores them, and indexes them based on client-specified criteria, and has workflow automation.  In addition, paperless office solutions help facilitate disaster recovery planning and reduce the exposure associated with eDiscovery requests.

Paperless office solutions allow construction companies to amass a central repository containing all of the critical documents typically silo’d by departmental applications.  As an example, users outside of accounting could access all of the invoice documents related to their project without requiring access to the accounting software or directly contacting accounting with their requests.  This type of open collaboration between employees, vendors, and subcontractors provides substantial benefits to project team members allowing them real-time access to the information required to perform their tasks.  If you are interested in learning more about how paperless office solutions could benefit your construction company, please do not hesitate to stop by our booth at CFMA to learn more.

“Going paperless” isn’t just good for the planet, there are practical business benefits as well. Sure, saving trees is a great added bonus. But, on April 22, we’re going to be discussing some business reasons for a paperless office in a webinar: Document Scanning: Best practices for a Paperless Approach using Document Management. All who are interested are welcome to join us.

From time to time, members of our team here at ColumbiaSoft are called on by various magazines and other media publications to contribute articles extending their knowledge of document management. For those in the construction industry in particular, you may be interested in the latest article by ColumbiaSoft product manager Scott Zieg who writes in Modern Contractor Solutions about the “Top 5 Document Management Solutions.” Scott says…

Remember when contractors focused on construction, not paperwork? Construction document management software can restore the balance.

You can read the entire article here: http://www.moderncontractorsolutions.com/articlesdetail.php?id_articles=504&id_artcatg=5

The idea of the paperless office was first theorized in a 1975 Business Week article that discussed how the personal computer revolution would put an end to paper records and book keeping.  Now, some thirty-four years later, while the type of information contained in paper form has changed, more than ever businesses are inundated with paper records.

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and others report:

• The average office worker goes through 10,000 sheets of copy paper a year.
• A reduction in a ton of paper production saves the equivalent of 4,100 kWh of energy and 7,000 gallons of water.
• Each employee in a typical business office generates 1.5 lbs of waste paper per day.

Each year, businesses spend significant resources printing, filing, storing, and retrieving paper documents.  Every aspect of the paper storage process adversely impacts a business’ budget and the environment as a whole.  Some of the more obvious financial drawbacks of paper storage include purchasing paper, spending personnel resources filing and finding documents, increasing square footage for physical file storage, and recovering from disastrous flood or fire damage.

In addition to financial costs, the environmental impacts cannot be ignored.  The production process to produce paper stock requires harvesting trees, consumes significant energy leading to increased greenhouse gases, and involves chemicals that we weren’t allowed to touch in chemistry class.  Storing filing cabinets in your office consumes additional real estate which has associated heating/cooling requirements and more.

Now the good news: there is an alternative to using so much paper that reduces your carbon footprint.  Businesses now have affordable paperless office solutions that not only increase productivity, but also make any environmentalist green with envy.  So what are paperless office solutions you ask?

Paperless office solutions are business software applications designed for digitally storing documents into a repository.  Documents can include anything from invoices, to emails, to contracts, to health records – you name it.  As the documents are stored in the system, they are associated with index information referred to as metadata attributes.  The metadata indexes provide users a means to quickly query documents using a web browser or other client application and retrieve the documents electronically on the computer screen.

For many paperless office solutions, also known as a document management system, storing, indexing, and retrieving documents is one of numerous capabilities they offer an organization.  Additional functionality includes electronic routing of documents for approval, email archive, records retention management, document scanning, optical character recognition (OCR), online collaboration with vendors and suppliers, security, disaster recovery, reporting, and more.

To learn more about how a document management system offers companies a sustainable business alternative to paper-intensive processes, read up on our paperless office solutions. Also, we’ve recently been included in Construction Specification Institute’s new GreenFormat listing – it offers a fast-and-easy approach to evaluating green product information.