The average office worker uses a sheet of paper every 12 minutes, over 10,000 sheets of paper a year, and disposes of 100 to 200 pounds of paper annually. Document management helps businesses reduce the need for paper, and take a paperless approach. With paperless document management software, businesses store and share paper electronically so that the need for printing and shipping of paper documents is reduced.

While offering a positive impact on the environment through less paper production and transportation, reducing the use of paper also provides for cost savings by improving business efficiency. The cost of handling, storing and shipping a single sheet of paper can add up to as much as $30.00 over a document’s lifecycle. When managed electronically, the actual cost of paper, storage facilities, and mailing or shipping are eliminated.

Business processes are improved using electronic collaboration tools that make sharing of documents easy with workflow routing, versioning, notifications, and approvals. Scanning tools capture paper documents and turn them into electronically searchable digital files, reducing the need for document storage and speeding document retrieval.

In addition to an all-around paperless office solution for managing electronic files, digitized paper documents, and email records, document management offers specific paperless business solutions in areas of: Accounts Payable routing and approval; electronic project collaboration; HR employee records management; compliance and regulatory document control; remote access for customers, vendors and partners; and more.

To learn more about growing a greener business, paperlessly, with electronic document management software visit ColumbiaSoft’s booth at the Energy Trust Better Living Show in Portland this weekend March 26th - 28th.

http://www.betterlivingshow.org/

A recent trend I am seeing with our customers is the desire to enhance their business infrastructure to support having employees work remote.  This arrangement benefits businesses in a number of ways including helping employee morale, allows for business continuity when weather strikes, saves space on real estate, and allows for increased productivity from their staff.

Creating an environment permitting employees to work remotely requires providing online access to critical information and documents.  At minimum, employers will need to enable remote access to their network environment and online computer systems.  However for most companies who are not paperless, acquiring information contained in filing cabinets and binders is simply not possible for remote employees.  A similar challenge is the capability of routing paper documents received in the mail to remote workers in a timely manner.

Document management systems with support for digitally scanning paper documents provide real-time access to information to your remote employees.  It is not uncommon for me to help companies create processes that involve scanning common mail items including applications, claims, and change of business forms and then assigning those items for processing (via workflow) to resources that work remotely.  I also work with companies to back-scan legacy documents from countless rows of filing cabinets, freeing up square footage and providing for online retrieval and manageable disaster recovery processes.

By implementing a paperless process, your organization will gain efficiencies, increase employee morale, free up office space resources, and provide for business continuity should disaster strike.

I read somewhere recently that the Environmental Paper Network (an organization with a “treatise that is meant to unify the efforts of environmental organizations in advancing environmental and social responsibility within the paper production and consumption cycle”) has calculated that if businesses were to cut their paper usage by 10%, it would reduce by 1.6 million tons the amount of greenhouse gas emissions in the United States… an equivalent of taking 280,000 cars off the road.

There’s a lot of interesting facts about paper and paper consumption to chew on. For example, did you know that according to the Lawrence Berkley National Laboratory the average office worker in the US uses 10,000 sheets of copy paper a year? That’s the equivalent of as much as a tree per worker person!

And, a bunch of sources, including the U.S. Department of Labor, say that one billion (yes, that is ‘billion’ with a ‘B’)… one billion photocopies are made EACH DAY!

A hopeful sign is that, by all appearances, the tide is starting to turn. Just ask the post office who’s seeing their first class mail volume drop so precipitously as people and business transition to electronic billing. Yes, once an ideal only considered in light of its impact on the environment… thinking paperlessly with tools like electronic document management has now become a stylish issue among the money-saving set too.

While the technology that drives document management marches forward (Windows 7, SQL Server, .NET), the business objectives of the clients are essentially unchanged.  Clients greatly need solutions for scanning paper documents, applying index information, routing documents through workflow processes, maintaining document retention policies, collaborating around documents, providing for disaster recovery, and easily searching for documents.

Whether companies are large or small, the sheer amount of documents and data that companies must store and manage outpaces their capabilities using paper filing systems or shared file servers.  With a modern document management system installed, users index documents as they are saved.  This in conjunction with power database tools provides the users with the capability to instantly retrieve or aggregate documents.  As an example, Document Locator is commonly deployed in an Accounts Payable process where documents are indexed with Company Name, Invoice Date, Check Number, and Amount.  By incorporating these index tags with document management, employees could easily retrieve all of the documents and approval notes for invoices received in the last 3 months that exceeded $20K via a web browser working from home.

In the economic downturn companies are struggling to maintain their business output while searching for ways to reduce costs.  Sadly this leads to layoffs and increased burden on those remaining in the organization.  While the natural tendency is to pull back spending, strategic investment in software that increase productivity can help maximize the resources you have remaining to drive your core business.