Archiving and organizing paper documents consumes a great amount of time. Employees who manually file the documents are also susceptible to commit errors in filing. A single document misplaced in the wrong folder or section is almost as bad as losing that document, especially when there are no duplicates or back-up electronic files. Paper documents can also be lost, destroyed or fail to be returned by employees who used them. The manual filing process involves manpower; and it is common knowledge that manpower costs are usually the most expensive expenditure a company has. This not only involves the salary but the training costs that the company invests on every employee. If the company can turn to a reliable and virtually infallible online document management software to handle their important data, the company will be able to save a huge amount of money.

It is quite common for organizational departments and sister companies that are located in different parts of the country or the world to share documents. The usual way for companies to solve problems in sharing paper documents is to make duplicate copies of these documents and store them in multiple locations that are quickly accessible to the companies. However this involves a huge waste of manpower and resources since the company will have to maintain employees that are responsible for storing and retrieving the documents. Version control is also impossible when people in different locations annotate and edit the paper documents. For the head office to determine the official copy of the document, it will need to hold meetings for the representatives of the geographically distributed organizational departments.

The problems that arise from the disparity among multiple copies of the supposedly same documents are numerous and disadvantageous to the company. For example, documents about the features and characteristic of a certain product need to be uniform and standard. In the unprecedented event that franchise or sister companies happen to differently annotate and edit copies of the documents and shared them with clients, should the clients discover the disparity among the documents, they could begin to question the credibility of the organization that governs these companies. The production of multiple copies of documents and document sharing reinforce the need to centralize the storage of original documents. These documents should be made available through secure, electronic document management systems.

Costs Involved in Manual Document Management Manpower Costs:

Manpower takes up a significant amount in the overhead costs of any organization in different parts of the world. From the costs during the hiring process, the pre-employment trainings, the regular salary and the bonuses, the organization spends a great deal in maintaining employees across all levels. Employees in charge of document management are in charge of printing, distributing and filing paper documents. These employees, however experienced they may be, are still susceptible to commit filing errors. There are additional time and money involved in having to redo the procedures involved in preparing the paper documents. The company will also have to shoulder such expenses that could otherwise have been spent on tasks that increase productivity.

Most companies utilize an intricate system of archiving paper documents in their storage area. However systematic the employees are, there is still a possibility of misplacing the documents. An employee in charge of document retrieval will most likely take a considerable amount of time in searching for a misplaced document. Should the document be needed immediately, the employee may have to report that the document is missing and will need to reprint the document. Although this entail an added cost, it would be only possible if such document actually has a back-up electronic copy. There are instances when some old files’ electronic copies have been corrupted. This would mean that the only surviving copies are the paper documents. It would cause the company a great deal of trouble if such paper documents are lost or destroyed during a fire or other natural disturbances.

Materials Costs:

The cost of printing and maintaining paper documents take up a significant amount in the company’s yearly overhead costs. Paper and printer toner entail the largest office supplies expenses in any company. A survey was done on 1000 different employees of a certain well-known office supply magnate. They were asked which two office supplies sell the most and the most common answers they gave were paper and toner. These costs are readily identified and quantified from accounts payable invoices. An estimated paper and toner reduction can be easily converted to big savings that can be used for more productive tasks. Turning most documents to electronic documents can greatly reduce material expenditure of the company.

Other miscellaneous costs involved in managing paper documents include storage supplies such as filing cabinets, folders, labels and plastic covers. Also included under miscellaneous costs are those that are involved in shredding, archiving and mailing of paper documents.

Equipments Costs:

Documents need to be printed, reproduced, sent by facsimile or even destroyed for confidentiality reasons. To be able to perform such processes, companies need to invest on different kinds of equipment. A company needs to have computers, printers, copiers, scanners, fax machines and shredders. These equipment need to be maintained and regularly checked. There are times when they need to be changed to ensure that processes are being performed smoothly. The electricity needed to use the equipment also needs to be taken into consideration. Electricity costs quite substantial especially during electricity price hikes.

A paperless office will simply need reliable desktops or laptops and a high-speed Internet connection. With electronic documents, filing and archiving is so much easier when utilizing an online document management software. Printing documents will only be occasionally necessary since there is efficient document sharing through document management platform. A company can work with a single account to be shared among its employees. An account administrator will handle the files and is in charge of granting access to the employees. Each employee will have different access privileges depending on their projects.

Storage Costs:

As companies expand, they acquire and produce significant amounts of paper documents over time. These documents, particularly important ones, need to be located in close proximity to workers. Such documents require extensive amounts of office storage space. In the cities, office rental is ridiculously expensive thus storage space for documents is often limited. The reason why some companies would opt to store documents in an off-site location is to make the most out of the rented office space within the city.

Storage spaces require to be protected and maintained to prevent damage to the documents. Pests such as rats or termites can feed on and destroy these documents. Natural disasters such as fire, floods and hurricanes can sufficiently damage an entire storage warehouse and all documents contained inside will be forever lost. Paper documents tend to have molds when stored in a humid environment. The storage spaces will need to be dry and cool to maintain the documents’ shelf-life as long as possible.

What makes up an online document management solution?

Online document management involves a process wherein documents are scanned, indexed, and stored as a digital copy of its original form. Once a document is in its digital form, it can be easily routed or distributed among the employees who need the document through their laptops or office desktops. For this to be made possible, users will need to have a high-speed Internet connection. State-of-the-art document management platforms utilize web-based architectures, hence only an Internet browser is needed to use the software.

Users will be given an access code by the account administrator of the company’s online document management software account. The good thing about online document management softwares is that they are being offered as ‘software as a service’ wherein the companies no longer need to install a software to their computer systems. All they need to do is to subscribe to the online solution to have their own account. This account will be managed by an appointed account administrator.

The account administrator is responsible of granting access privileges to the users. It is up to the administrator to determine the extent of the access privilege given to a particular employee. There is always the need to protect the confidentiality of documents even from the eyes of the company’s own employees. Software companies are aware of this fact which is why they designed the intricate access privilege feature in maintaining document confidentiality. An administrator can assign the folders to a group of users to which only they can have access to. Users assigned codes only allow them to have access to the folders they are directly involved in. In instances where they are removed from a project and transferred to another project, the administrator can change that particular user code’s accessibility. Should employees resign or be terminated, the administrator can also remove their accessibility to render their codes invalid.

Online document management softwares have an automatic and organized system of archiving stored and uploaded documents for convenient retrieval. Filing errors are virtually eliminated with the online solutions’ foolproof archiving system. To retrieve documents, users no longer need to go through the folders even if they know the documents’ location. All they need to do is to type the title of the document in the document management software’s built-in search engine. In cases where the users forgot the title of the documents, all they need to do is type the keywords that the document contains and the software will present a list of possible matches relevant to the keywords given.

Document workflow management is another feature that is being offered by document management softwares. Aside from storing and retrieving documents, the online document management software automatically routes throughout the organization to deliver the newly uploaded documents to the electronic inboxes of the involved individuals. This is similar to a mail delivery system, only a hundred times faster and more efficient. This routing process follows the path that a document usually takes until it has passed through the different individuals concerned and reaches the working cycle’s completion. The document undergoes annotations and changes during the work cycle, as the cycle is completed the document is either archived or discarded.

Electronic documents stored in online vaults are safe and immune from any form of environmental hazard, loss, destruction, and theft. Online storage provide a safe and secure environment with its military technology of transporting electronic documents over the Internet. Each file uploaded is encrypted twice before travelling through the Internet to the online vaults which make them invisible to the eyes of Internet hackers. As the paperless office becomes more convenient and beneficial to companies, online document management may very well replace the traditional and manual document management system.

Global concerns on environmental changes due to depletion of forests led most companies to use less and less paper documents. The green movement is no longer simply an effort put forth by concerned environmental organizations. Companies have begun sharing the mission and vision of environmental groups in reducing paper consumption and saving trees. The fact that technology has created a way to let people carry on with their work efficiently without having to rely on paper is truly astounding. It is now up to companies who still rely on paper documents to be open-minded to the benefits that could be gained by turning their paper documents into electronic documents.

Document Management Solutions

It seems that technology is touching every aspect of our lives and telecommuting is one of the biggest changes. Telecommuting is essentially working from home and every year it gets easier for employers to offer this option to their employees. Internet based collaboration, including online meetings, document sharing, information access, and video conferencing are all making the concept of telecommuting a reality. Companies are more socially responsible today and offer products and services that enable information sharing and collaboration via the Internet and are making telecommuting more productive and convenient than ever before.

Impact on the environment is one of the most positive reasons for companies to promote telecommuting to their workforce. We are living in a time when most things that we do as a society tear down or destroy our planet. Telecommuting is definitely one thing that we can do to help save it. So what are the ways that telecommuting can help our environment? The following four examples are at the top of my list:

Vehicle Costs:
A tremendous amount of energy is required to produce transportation equipment such as automobiles, buses, trains and jet aircraft. If telecommuting is promoted, there will be less use of this equipment and less energy will be required for production, maintenance and repair of this equipment. Even more significantly, fuel resources needed to operate this equipment will be reduced, as well. Many studies have been done quantifying the large amount of resources wasted every year by commuters stuck in rush hour traffic.

Highway Costs:
The building, repair and maintenance of highways requires a large consumption of energy. Not only in the operation of the highway construction and repair equipment, but also in the manufacture and transportation of the required materials. An increase in the percentage of people telecommuting to work will decrease the need for expanded highways and associated road maintenance. In addition to highways, parking lots are continuing to consume more and more of our land surface area. If a larger percentage of people telecommuting to work, existing highways could be reduced in size and many parking lots could be converted to parks.

Office Building Costs:
The office building has heating, cooling and lighting needs, and the materials to build it and maintain it require energy in their production and transportation. Working from home requires only modest incremental demands on energy for heating, cooling and lighting needs, and makes effective use of existing building space and facilities. The trend toward video conferencing and internet based meetings is also gathering steam. Technology is finally making these modes of conducting business both dependable and productive. Having people attend meetings remotely reduces office space requirements, especially those large meeting rooms which are used only part of each day. These large spaces take a lot of energy to heat, cool and light.

Air Quality:
Whether or not you believe that the internal combustion engine is contributing to the erosion of the ozone layer and consequently to global warming; nobody can argue the negative affect that they have on air quality. One of the largest sources of pollution is the automobile. This is especially true of slow-moving automobiles that often exist in heavy, congested rush hour traffic. Of course, one solution to this problem is increasing the size and number of our roads, but an even better solution is to encourage those who can telecommute to do so.

Telecommuting is definitely one of the positive things that we are doing today as a society and not just in the United States. This is a worldwide trend that will grow as each developing country becomes Internet enabled.

The paperless office doesn’t mean that there will be no paper at all. It does mean that the amount of paper that one would find in an office will be significantly reduced. More importantly it means a societal change which will lead to the practical change. People need to start thinking of ways that they can reduce the use of paper, which has run rampant in our society.

Change the workplace:
We need to make significant changes to the workplace if we expect to go paperless. One suggestion is to remove all paper in the workplace that could possibly be replaced by electronically stored documents. A perfect example would be the rooms that are filled with glossy sales brochures that describe products, services, customer references, press releases, etc. etc. Literature Rooms have been a part of corporate life for as long as I can remember. They are usually located in the hallway exiting the building so sales people can grab what they need on the way out. These rooms filled with exquisitely labeled shelves are a way of life for most sales oriented companies. They are also a tremendous waste of paper and trees; wasting both financial and natural resources. People are becoming more accustomed to accessing electronic documents at vendor web sites rather than having to keep hard copy brochures. Vendors need to follow this lead by eliminating the Literature Room, or at least drastically reducing it.

On Demand Printing:
We also need to begin utilizing technology to eliminate the needless waste of paper. A good example is to utilize an online Document Management solution, such as file hosting, to reduce paper waste and eliminate the need to store paper documents. Documents can be scanned and maintained in a central location for everyone to share. No longer do we need to have stacks of forms in each office, which all need to be discarded when a new version comes out. Who hasn’t walked by a trash can and seen countless sales brochures or business forms that have been needlessly discarded? Software as a Service (SaaS) solutions for Document Management enable documents to be printed when needed or as is commonly referred to: On Demand. On Demand printing provides any user with the latest version of any document, regardless of when or where it was modified. Tremendous savings in both paper costs and trees would be possible if discarded, outdated documents were never printed in the first place. Check out our On Demand Printing services in Dallas, Texas.