The Paper-free Workplace

In the past there has been a lot said about the idea of the paperless office.  The paperless office is exactly that; a working environment that uses computers for all document management and processing without the necessity for printed sheets of A4 paper to be produced ever.

This idea is not new; it has its origins in the early utopian visions of 1960’s science fiction and it has spread to become one of those buzzwords or theories which never seems to go away, but also seems destined to never quite be universally attained.

I have always found it strange that the easier an idea is to achieve the further away from it people will get.  I have seen two offices which I would class, after a fair amount of debate, as paperless.  Both are in the Ipswich offices of major insurance companies – for the sake of clarity I should point out that it’s two different major insurance companies although they have similar systems in place.

The debate over whether they are truly paperless comes from the fact that while they might aspire to free themselves of paper, their customers and contractors still insist that important communications be managed by way of post; actual pieces of paper with words on, folded and placed inside another piece of paper and delivered by a person.  So the primary source of tasks to be completed and the resulting output of the paperless offices that I visited is still pieces of paper.

However: the incoming letters are sorted and scanned in their respective post rooms and then the scanned pages sent via email to the relevant person.  Outgoing mail arrives at a pre-production phase in the same post room where it is proof read, errors or letters without correct addresses are returned to sender, before they have even been sent, those that pass this careful scrutiny are printed out and posted onwards.  So the post room has paper in it, quite a lot of paper.  But the offices don’t, hence the conclusion that the offices are paperless although I would be willing to concede it could be a technicality.

On a related note I think the following is an often overlooked example of business efficiency; most companies that have waste paper have shredders and recycling schemes for their ground-up waste documents; so numerous privacy and data protection and waste management issues are addressed by the same hardware and environmentally friendly policy.  I think that’s very clever.

It’s also quite easy to see that with today’s high degree of connectivity, the capabilities of modern programming languages and the hardware that operates them the ability to share documents across networks or even networks of networks could be streamlined further to allow even less paper and even less lost time.

The examples of paperless offices I gave required a lot of bandwidth as they were emailing scanned documents back and forth across their networks.  Scanned documents are generally stored in image formats which can be quite large, leading to a slower network.  The modern PDF file format allows scanned images to be stored in a relatively much smaller file for broadcast – it is worth noting that in the late 1980’s the innovator of the PDF file format John Warnock wrote in a white paper that lead to the development of the PDF:

“Imagine being able to send full text and graphics documents (newspapers, magazine articles, technical manuals etc.) over electronic mail distribution networks. These documents could be viewed on any machine and any selected document could be printed locally. This capability would truly change the way information is managed.”

The idea of the paperless office is still very much with us; even the industry giant Microsoft has made some moves to resurrect the dream with it’s excellent Sharepoint software and many smaller companies, particularly those that need properly completed paperwork from the field or for legislative purposes (such as the all indemnifying “risk assessment form”)  returned in a timely manner in order to complete billing or meet deadlines are finding the benefits of automating as much of their traditional process as possible.

The other area, mentioned briefly in the last paragraph, is the area of field workers or, to use another industry buzzword, mobile workers.  There are obvious benefits to reducing the amount of physical paperwork that needs to be completed in the field, not least of all that not having any paper to fill out means there is no paper to be lost or returned late.  

Large scale logistics operations like the Royal Mail were the first to embrace the idea of digitising delivery paperwork using a hand held device to capture delivery times and even the signatures of those receiving deliveries.  These systems have evolved over the years, indeed the system that British Telecom uses to schedule and maintain it’s vast network of service technicians will even dynamically alter schedules in real time to cover eventualities like traffic jams and customer cancellations. 

However these are two rare examples of big companies using new technology to improve their efficiency; in my experience of systems that advocate working smarter rather than harder it is SME’s that usually adopt this kind of technology first.  For a reasonable investment they can free up valuable time by cutting down paperwork.

Consider this example: I recently visited a new client who has a business in a fairly niche market and whose company could correctly be described as a “going concern”.  After running through their sales order to delivery process I worked out that they spent an average of thirty minutes per order repeating one thing in different places in different pieces of paperwork, namely; filling in the customers name and address.

Factoring in the average amount of orders they took in a day, the staff levels and a few other relevant criteria we worked out that if they automated their paperwork process so that each individual detail only had to be entered once per order and that repeat orders could be automatically generated they would save the equivalent of an extra member of staffs worth of hours a year.  I think most people would agree that swapping a load of paperwork for an entire member of staff to do more work would have a good effect on productivity (I will concede that in some offices this would depend entirely on which member of staff you are gaining).

Here’s a final piece of information about the paperless office:  The figures show that the more computers you put in an office, the more paper that office generates.