Paper - less Office Part 1

This is the first of many posts on our firm's transition to a less paper office. I just came back from an excellent presentation by another firm on their transition. I will see if I can get permission to share some of their great ideas and challenges.

I wanted to first post that when thinking of the technology impact of a more electronic office think first of how you will handle the volume of data. For our firm this meant adding more hard drives and making sure we had a backup system which was able to scale with our increased data demands. More on the backup solution we came up with in another post.

The next step from a purely hardware side (note policies and buy-in are probably come before this chronologically but for my purposes today I am dealing with hardware) is selecting scanners. This really is a business process issue if you currently have people used to going to main copiers and need to still make copies then looking into adding onto or leasing copiers with higher end document scanners built in is an excellent idea. If, however, staff process mail at their desk, desktop scanners are an excellent option.

Desktop scanners used to be single sheet fed or barely ADF machines that did a terrible job. Time and technology growth in the million dollar scanning industry have brought better products to market. The 2 I have focused in on are the Xerox Documate 152 and the Fujitsu S500. Both can be found for between $400-$500 with software. Both come with Adobe products which off the shelf cost as much or more then the machines themselves. These really are fantastic deals for decent machines.

I have seen the Fujistu product in action and the things right now that have me leaning that direction are its ability to deal with lots of paper types. This machine can handle small pieces of glossy paper all the way to legal documents. It orients them automatically, scans both sides and adjusts to color or black and white all on the fly. The documents can also be OCR'd as they are being scanned. I will get into the benefits and pitfalls of individual machines doing this process at a later time. Properly configured this little machine can make searchable PDF's of about anything very quickly all at the staff members desk. I encourage people to find reps for Xerox and Fujitsu and go see these machines in action because they will get a lot of use if you can convince people to use them.

More to follow on growing your own cost effective paperless office system....