I hate paper. I hate paying people to lug pieces of paper around from one place to another. I've been on a campaign to rid us of paper and meaningless steps with paper for years now, and I'm making such little progress.

(We're almost rid of the two ton paper Fed Ex bill and three ton paper phone bill...making progress, but so s-l-o-w-l-y)

My biggest "triumph" was pushing to get rid of the five year archive of paper for orders and invoices and whatnot that was choking our little spare storage space. It's a "triumph" and not a triumph! because, hell, the scanning system we put in is not all it was cracked up to be. Cost us about $20,000 to install, but, to run it properly and efficiently and exactly, I'd have to hire somebody full time just to scan and code the documents properly for our division alone. Well, the only thing worse than the damn paper is allocating resources that could be better put to taking care of a customer to caring for paper instead.

Instead, the scanning ends up being done catch-as-catch-can and I can never find what I want anymore at all. I miss the days I could just go over to a file cabinet and pull out the paper I needed.

How are you guys doing? Are you drowing in paper or have you somehow conquered the demon?

Andrea
who is still drowing in paper, just not the ones she needs when she needs them

Oh yeah, in the hospital we've gone paperless. First, we need a piece of paper (like a doctor's script, or the sheet we make that tells the techs what exam they're doing and the patient's medical record number, or the copies of the ins. card, etc). Then, we need to have a copy of that stuff go over to the techs who send it to the doctors. The doctors throw it out after they look at it. So, we need a back up. So there are two copies of everything, because in the five weeks we've been up and scanning I've been able to do it ONE DAY! That's it. The system is so flawed, it's disgusting. So now I have a STAPLES copy paper box FULL of things needing to be scanned when/if the system ever starts working, and that's just the patients I've seen. Every receptionist seems to have their own pile. DOH!

So, to be paperless, we are much less efficient, and making more copies of things, so we are wasting more paper. What the hell is the point?

We had big plans to go paperless a few years back, and we're only partially successful.

It was our intent to scan all invoices when they came into the office, code them, email them to the district office where they'd be approved (electronically), and mailed back to head office, where they'd be paid and filed (all electronically). This would have enabled us to give our suppliers one address (head offices) and therefore ensure we didn't have any unhappy suppliers out there who weren't being paid because their invoices were sitting on a district office desk.

Our email system couldn't handle thousands of 70KB pages going back and forth, however. So it was only partially implemented. I have hopes that now that we're on Outlook email (we used to be on Beyond Mail, on a Banyan vines network) we'll be able to implement the electronic approval and coding.

We still get invoices sent to all district offices. They are then approved and sent to head office, where they are scanned, coded and shredded. It's almost as fast as tossing it into a file folder. The scanners are extremely high speed.

To look up an invoice, you really have to be at head office, though. Our imaging system doesn't work even over the high speed data lines we have going between our head off and the district offices. But if you are at head office, looking up an invoice from your desk is awfully handy.

Reducing the amount of file drawers needed has let us give all the Accounts payable staff more room.

The scary thing is that this is just the tip of the iceberg as far as what we could do to get rid of paper. We have 600 stores, generating about 50 or 60 invoices a week, all of which should be scanned, coded and shredded. I hate paying warehouse fees for these boxes for 7 years. We can't even find things when we want to.

A long way to go, that's for sure.

p

Doesn't anyone else get annoyed that they have to get up and put the piece of paper onto the scanner? That's really a good percentage of the reason I hate the paperless system. I don't like the extra work. It's an extra step. I hate extra steps. I try to do things in less and less steps at work, not more. And people like me are usually praised for that. I can do in an hour what another person can get done from the time she comes in til the time she goes to lunch. It's all about efficiency. Why are offices implimenting this non-efficient thing? Now when you want to know something, you have to get into the system and find it, rather than just pulling the folder.

I don't know. Maybe this is too new for me. I do hate change. Still, I hate taking more time to do things when there isn't enough time in the work day as it is. ARUGH!

Margaret, picture a room full of file folders. All tightly packed in drawers, waiting to give people paper cuts.

Maybe they're filed correctly. Maybe not. Maybe the file you want is in the filing cabinet, or maybe it's on the director's desk, because he asked for it, and the signout sheet wasn't filled in correctly because "I just need it for a second".

Maybe the file is in someone's briefcase.

Or maybe someone threw a lit match into the room, and they all burned up, leaving your record-keeping in ruins.

Paper wastes space. Good record rooms have controlled access, which is less efficient than giving everyone access to the electronic files (within limits, of course) and saying "Get it yourself".

I'm talking accounting offices here. I'm not sure how this would work with hospitals, but I would think that being able to pull up a patient record would be something you'd want to do at a nurse's station, or in billing, or in one of the doctor's offices. Paper isn't that efficient. Scanning everything requires a greater investment up front in time, but it is supposed to pay off down the line.

Ideally, there would be no paper from start to finish.

In an accounting office, you'd receive electronic copies of invoices from suppliers. These electronic invoices would be coded, approved, and filed. If they're for product, they'd be automatically checked against a price book giving the approved cost information. They'd be automatically sent to the right person to approve them, based on the store number or supplier. Maybe it would all be done in pdf files (created by Adobe Acrobat)

Scanning is an interim technology, created to help along those who still use paper into the electronic age. The forms you are scanning should all be online.

It's frustrating to see technology to take so long to become accepted. I remember trying out OCR software about 5 years ago, thinking "if only I had just a little more powerful processor, this would work", and it's still not working that well. It was still easier to retype portions of a 300 page report (all numbers) over the course of 2 days than it was to scan it, try to get the OCR to work, and feed 300 pages into the scanner.

Half the time, I'm trying to convince our accounting department to keep electronic copies of reports that they normally just print and file.

:brickwall

P

We have been trying to implement a "scanning solution" like this for years. No such cluck. We run into the same problems you are seeing. :<

Now this is a useful discussion! I'm so unbelievably frustrated ...

Speaking strictly of order flow process (and not things like the Fed Ex or phone bills), this is what I've been able to do over the last years:

1) Our front end order process is still completely paper driven. While we keep the status/transaction log of the orders in the computer, we still depend on paper copies of the order moving through the work flow. Due to the nature of our orders and customers, this means a typical order will have 20 to 30 sheets of paper each, by the end of the cycle. We do about 15,000 orders a year in my division alone..do the multiplication, that's a lot of paper.

2) I was able to eliminate paper in two steps of the art process of an order cycle. Our art department now emails the art proofs to our customer service people, rather than printing and hand delivering them. Our customer service people now use Zeta fax to fax the proofs to the customers, rather than hand faxing paper. Sounds like a no brainer? Easy as pie? It took me two years to make it happen. Nothing is ever as easy as it sounds....but this works well and is a true time and paper saver.

3) We were more or less forced into back end scanning for document storage two years ago due to plain lack of space. I get the "honor" of being the techno force behind the choice to scan instead of rent storage space. This isn't one of my success stories.....at least I was smart enough to try to implement it in stages, and when we got stuck on stage one, we didn't go further. Hip hip hooray for me.

An order is no longer live for us once the invoice has been paid. There are reasons to need to access the paper copy of an order in history, but they are limited. I figured, we'll start with this stuff, get that system going, and then work our way backwards to conquer the paper demon.

And that's where we stalled. We didn't cheap out on the system or the equipment. (It may have been more than 20K, now come to think of it.) We bought two highspeed scanners that take either 30 or 50 sheets at a time (can't remember which). The software was supposed to just pick up the order number from the orders as they were fed in, and then everybody was supposed to have the program on their computer to access the orders quickly by order number or any other keywords that the software would also pick up.

Practically, I've got bins and mounds and tons of documents waiting to be fed in. The scanners have been less than promised (understatement)...constantly breaking. The software sucks. It doesn't pick up what we need it to pick up most of the time...and, to work properly, needs a live, trained human being to read the documents and input the proper keywords/order number. The incentive to take care of a document storage problem is low, because we will always put problems or issues with live orders that affect customers at the top of the list.

The end result is that I can't find anything I need. This virtually never affects a customer, because I've installed enough back up means of retrieving vital information on customer order history (through our order computer system and the art department's art order system) that we can find anything we need for a customer request with a little digging.

I need to look at paper copies of orders though, in order to track back mistakes or omissions by our customer service people in real customer contact names though, for marketing purposes. I've got a stack of institutional accounts from the springtime, for instance, that don't have a viable contact name recorded in our computer. I know the information is somewhere in the papers, but hell if I can find the papers or a scan of the papers.

Didn't somebody promise me a paperless society 20 years ago?



Andrea

BTW, I can see after reading over my posts and Pageclot's and Margaret's that my problem is pretty much this:

At this point in history, it takes more, not fewer, people resources to manage a scanning system than it does a paper filing system. We're willing to put out the money for the equipment and the software, but we're not willing to dedicate more manpower to it. People belong taking care of customers, not paper.

:angry:

Andrea
who hates every sheet of paper except the one she needs at any given time

Andrea, more than a year ago, we switched our order line to Jfax, which converts incoming faxes to .tiff attachments in email. We simply move the attachment to the customer's record in our CRM system and we're done. Actually there are a hundred ways you could store the attachments - this one just works for us.

We still have 20 cabinets of contracts, but that's because I've been unwilling to pay a temp to fax the contracts in to us and attach them to customer accounts. I'll probably do that with some cheap summer high school help.

Quote:Andrea, more than a year ago, we switched our order line to Jfax, which converts incoming faxes to .tiff attachments in email. We simply move the attachment to the customer's record in our CRM system and we're done. Actually there are a hundred ways you could store the attachments - this one just works for us.

Well good for you!

Doesn't help me though.... I can't imagine when I'd be able to tackle incoming orders. We get them through fax, internet, email, phone, snail mail, fed ex...every concievable way. I'm sure I've had orders sent in on cocktail napkins at one time or another.

I'm just jealous. :tongue:

Andrea
looking for the perfect scanner for cocktail napkins

The problem is everyone is looking short term instead of long term, and converting is a long term problem.

First thing, yah, everyone puts their resources toward live customer service. But in the long run, adding that one extra employee will benefit every customer, not just the one on the phone. Your future employees will be able to call up the customer in seconds instead of running for the filing cabinet.

And the reason the software is so buggy is that not enough people are working with it and the needed amount of resources simply aren't there.

K. I know this because my job at the postal service was implimented so that they could take out the next level of paperwork.

One, my job was developed to take out the slack while they worked out the bugs in the software. Two, having people do the work first they could adapt the software from issues and problems we were faced with.

From over two hundred divisions of people with hundreds of employees at each division, my division is down to two divisions, period. Now it took 4 - 5 years, but it was worth it.

Now, not many people have the resources of the postal service to impliment this kind of change over. Which is why it will take a concerted effort from all businesses to make the change. And people simply aren't ready. I figure it will happen when the kids in college, who would die without their email and are accustomed to handing in work via the net, rise up to CEO positions in the bigger companies. Then we'll all start moving toward no paper.

Of course I'll be dead by then... but hey! It's nice to know it will happen eventually.



Lynne

And yah, I'm interested. Simply because that's what I love to do. Not the intermediate steps of converting, but coding the process paperless in the first place. The exchange of information w/o a paper trail.

And when I say that people aren't ready, just think of the total percent of the US population, let alone around the rest of the world, who trust electronic banking. Not a big percentage.

People simply MUST have their paper trail or they're not happy.

Lynne

Very thoughtful response, Lynne. I agree completely that any conversions away from paper have to be carefully and systematically implemented, or you get too much pushback from people who want their paper. One of the main reasons that it took me two years to get our art/proofing processes away from paper was that I insisted that the all of the people involved buy in first, rather than just forcing a change. Okay, not everybody bought in, but enough did...and we planned carefully, and we did troubleshooting and testing, and the voila, it worked. :thumbs:

Here's an example of why even people who hate paper (me), get addicted to their paper back up:

8 months ago now, we started our quest to tame our Fed Ex bill, which is customarily delivered in a box by Fed Ex. (Shame, shame, shame on Fed Ex for having truly shitty invoice management! They can track a package in a nanosecond, but they won't spend any effort trying to help me manage my bills :angry: ) Our invoices can total as much as $40,000 a month, trying to cost allocate and even verify the accuracy of the charges on paper was impossible.

Enter Accuship. I'd read about the company in INC magazine, and they seemed to be able to do what we couldn't do with Fed Ex. (I recommend anyone who has any shipping invoice management issues, especially Fed Ex but not limited to Fed Ex, check this company out.) After several months of checking them out, meetings, negotiation, whatever, we took the plunge and signed up for their bill managment services. (Not a small amount of money, I believe we are paying in the neighborhood of $1000 a month.)

We had a few rocky months (in which Accuship didn't charge us because of data management issues on their end), we looked ready to roll with all Accuship, no Fed Ex bill by November of 2001. Well, somebody in our front office got too hasty. Unbeknowst to me, they discontinued the Fed Ex detail report, by cost center, out of our warehouse....for no good reason other than they didn't like being handed the report by the warehouse manager every morning. Nobody ever made sure that the cost center stuff was appearing on the Accuship information.

Cut to the chase, it wasn't. When the Accuship information came in, somebody up front just guessed out their butt as to whom to assign the charges to, and yeah, I ended up being overcharged 10K to my division. I found out about it two months later and had to go through the data myself, record by record.

Eventually, I got the Fed Ex tech in, spent the day with him, and got him to retrieve the paper reports for the three months prior from the three Fed Ex stations in our building. (We tried to do it in .csv file format, but it didn't work.) I kissed the stacks of paper as they spilled out of the pinfed printer!

Now, my Accuship data problems are supposedly solved, but when, if ever, do you think I'll discontinue the paper reports, "just in case"?

Once burned is twice shy.

Andrea
whose problems here are with Fed Ex and internal office folks, not Accuship