Paperless 411

What Paper Costs (The Bigger Picture)

2008-07-08T15:28:00.000-07:00

I often say that moving to electronic documents can save a business serious money. I'm speaking from my own experience and from observing other businesses that are doing this. Simply put; It makes your company more efficient and reduces costs for labor, consumables and storage. A dollar saved is a dollar earned and in a tight economy that's a very important dollar.

I felt good about this, but recently a number of eminent sources have pointed out to me that there is a bigger picture to be considered; what does it do for the environment if we reduce paper usage? My first thought was, It improves things!, however this felt a bit weak so I had a go at quantifying how much paper we actually use and what it takes to produce it.

I concentrated on paper for printing and writing. This is the stuff we use most in the office. I didn't include newsprint because there's not much that a regular business can do to reduce this. Also this is a bit conservative because I only consider the cost of production and not what we do with it, transport, mailing costs etc. I also didn't consider the negative CO2 impact of the removal of so many trees. (Paper production accounts for 40% of all the trees felled in the world).
There are a number of good information sources available on the web including several from the U.S. Department of Energy.

Here's a little 8-slide presentation on the impact of office-paper production in the U.S. (Note: Even though the numbers are HUGE, this is still only 27% of total U.S. paper production.)

What Paper Costs (PDF)

I must confess I learned a lot working through these figures. One thing is that the annual energy used to produce paper is routinely measured in quads.
A quad is a thousand trillion BTUs of energy (or 10x¹⁵ BTUs for the scientifically inclined). When you are working with numbers that have 15 zeros after them you know it adds up to a really big impact.
On a more human scale; The average US office worker consumes 10,000 sheets of paper a year while an attorney consumes a ton!

Here are some good resource links (Some of them are a bit technical - sorry).

U.S. Department of Energy: Energy and Environmental Profile of the U.S. Pulp and Paper Industry (PDF)
U.S. Environmental Protection Agency: Trends in Selected Manufacturing Sectors (PDF)
National Energy Education Development (NEED) Project. US Energy Consumption.
IPST technical paper series number 601 Pulp and paper mill water use in North America (PDF)
U. C. Irvine, Physics and Astronomy (Dennis Silverman) Energy Units and Conversions

This one (sponsored by the U.S. D.O.E) is a really good non-technical reference on paper use.
Cutting Paper

Back it up Buddy!

2008-05-08T17:29:00.000-07:00

OK so it's not easy to get the message home about backups without being a complete nag. I know it's important; You know it's important; We all know it's important so stop nagging me about it, already! Right? - Well no not quite!

You see there's knowing that something is important and understanding that it's important. "What's the difference?" you may ask. I think we can know something on an intellectual basis but it's when we feel it's consequences on an emotional level that we really understand.
When I tell you that backups are important in case you have a hard disk failure, you may nod sagely and say "How true!". That's knowing the importance of your backups.
When your hard disk has failed and I ask, "Do you have a good backup of your company documents?" the thoughts rushing through your mind at that moment are a profound understanding of the importance of that backup.
For my sins I've been party to these conversations many times. I've often felt when I'm nagging someone about the importance of backups that I'm not really getting the message through. I've also had to inform businesses (both large and small) that have had a disk failure that they didn't have a valid backup. Honestly it's a wretched task. Reactions include panic, tears and aggression (usually toward the messenger). The consequences aren't pleasant either; Professional embarrassment, lost work, cost of recovery efforts, even dismissal.

Here are some of the causes that I've seen in the past:

1) The backups were simply not done. -- Very common!
There was no backup strategy at all or it was not carried out. No-one changed the tape or disc.
2) There was only one backup copy
This one is painfully common. Someone saves money by only having one backup media. Say a tape or a usb drive. Then there's a catastrophic failure during the backup. Now the original data is gone because of the failure and the backup is bad because it has just been (halfway) overwritten. It's a false-economy; Spring for a second usb drive or make sure that you have at least 5 tapes.
3) The backups were being performed but no-one checked that they were being successful.
I've seen this one more than once. Heck, I've had this happen to me more than once. This is where you've got your backup system going. Say you backup to tape and you swap the tape every evening without fail but at some point the backups started to fail and you didn't know it because you didn't read back a tape to check that what you expected to be on it was there.
There are a myriad of reasons why a perfectly good backup will stop working. Here are a few:
a) The amount of data got too big for the tape.
b) Someone moved the data directory but forgot to update the backup tool.
d) Folder permissions were changed and the backup process no longer had rights to the data.
4) The backup media was over-used.
This is common with tape backups. They don't last forever you know. Eventually they wear out and the magnetic stuff comes off the ribbon. I've seen this one happen in a large company. All the tapes were bought together and they all wore out together. When we needed a backup we found errors on the first two tapes that we tried. That was the longest few hours while we tried each backup in turn. I had a nightmarish vision that all five tapes would be bad. Incidentally this would have been caught if the veracity of the backups was being checked regularly.
5) Incremental backups. -- This is a real pitfall.
Incremental backups are where you backup all the data on Monday night. Then you only backup the changes on subsequent nights. If you need to restore then you first restore the full backup and then apply each incremental backup until you have the full restore. There are a few pitfalls with this:
a) By the end of the week you are relying on 5 backups so you're 5 times more likely to have a failure. If any of them fail then you have a problem. If the full backup at the beginning of the week fails then the incrementals are useless and you have no backup at all for the week. If you are (foolishly) working with a single set of 5 tapes (or disks) then you have NO BACKUP AT ALL
b) In small companies that don' t have a professional admin person it is really easy to put the wrong tape in and overwrite a previous increment.
c) My advice is ... Don't do incremental backups unless you have it down pat.
5) Backups were successful but not protected.
Well they were probably successful but we'll never know for sure. Sometimes people think that the only thing they have to worry about is their hard drive failing. It is the most common failure but I've seen a small fire take out the computer server and the backups that were in a plastic box beside it. Backups need to be cycled off-site or stored in a fire-proof safe. A small fire-proof safe only costs a few hundred dollars. I'd recommend getting one rated for at least 2-hours.

To Sum up ...

One of the advantages of going paperless is that it lets you backup all of your documents easily. It could take months with a photocopier to accomplish the same task for paper documents. However the disadvantage is that barring a natural disaster such as flood or fire your a hard-drive is more likely to lose your documents than an old fashioned file cabinet. So be prepared and make sure those (easy to do) backups are done.

I must go... I've got to check my backups.

Sometimes it's easier not to eat the whole Elephant...

2008-04-14T14:06:00.000-07:00

Going paperless can seem like a daunting task. And in fact if you're goal is to be 100% paperless it is a daunting task! But you can go partly paperless or even mostly paperless without investing in complex document management systems and re-engineering all of your business processes.

The first thing to consider is what it means to "go paperless".

1) The 100% Paper-Free Work-flow
This approach involves taking everything that your business currently does and re-implementing it to be managed in a software application. It not only digitizes your documents but also implements the business processes that involve the documents. For instance if you have a business rule that says that incoming invoices must be signed off by the original purchaser before being passed to Accounts-Payable then this would be codified in the system and the digitized invoice would be routed to the correct person for approval before being sent to AP for payment. These implementations are usually built upon a sophisticated document management system. All of the work-flows and document types for a particular business are defined in the system. Workers can then perform their business tasks such as authorizing purchases or approving payment of invoices on a computer screen. This can be very effective in an environment where there are complicated business processes. The document management system will track where in the process a document is and where it must go next.
These kinds of systems can be expensive. Implementation costs include software and hardware costs, consulting and customization and end-user training.

2) File Store and Retrieve

At its simplest "Going Paperless" can simply mean storing and viewing documents and in an electronic form. This is really not that difficult to do and in itself can yield big savings and operational efficiency gains. Documents can be digitized by scanning paper documents that you receive or by "printing" directly to PDF format rather than to paper. Documents can be stored on a server hard-drive and are accessible to everyone in the office for viewing. It could be as simple as creating a folder on the drive to hold the documents scanned from each folder in your filing cabinets. If this is combined with optical character recognition (OCR) then full-text searches can be used to find any document by searching on any of the text in the document. This kind of system is not suitable for environments that have complex work-flows but it can be applied very effectively in small businesses or as a departmental solution in a large organization. This approach won't automate all of your business work-flows but it will allow you to save a lot of time filing and finding documents and allow you to eliminate a lot of the need to print-to-paper.

Takeaway

If your business is hampered by a growing need to store and manage documents, consider starting out by moving to a solution whereby you "have less paper" rather than a solution that is 100% paperless. Costs rise very steeply as you move to a completely paperless solution while a lot of cost savings can be realized simply by storing and viewing your documents digitally. For a small business or department this might be the right balance between costs and savings. Even if you do progress to a more sophisticated solution you may be able to avoid the shock and trauma of going from 100% paper to 100% paperless in one step.

Making your Small Office Paperless

2007-11-02T19:46:00.000-07:00

Going paperless an absolute beginners guide.

Without preamble or further ado ...

Bills and Statements
Subscribe to get your bills and statements by email. This can reduce a lot of paper coming in the door and save you the bother of having to scan it. If you get a lot of email (who doesn't) it's really easy to miss a bill and forget to pay it. I recommend getting a separate email account specially for these.

Scanners
You've probably got a lot of paper already and there will be more coming in the mail tomorrow. You need a scanner. You need to get one with an automatic feeder and a flatbed. You'll need the flatbed for scanning receipts. Make sure it does at least 15 pages per minute. It doesn't matter how few documents you have you won't have the patience to watch anything slower and you'll just give up on it. If you have the budget for it I would recommend a duplex scanner. This will scan both sides of a page in one pass. You may not have many double-sided documents but its really fiddly to try scan two-sided documents by loading them twice on the scanner.
Tip: Scanner manufacturers give their speed rating based on Black-and-White scanning at 200 dpi. If you scan in greyscale it will be slower. Unfortunately some scanners are a bit slower and others are a lot slower.
Tip: The quality of the sheet-feeder is more important than the raw speed of the scanner. If the feeder occasionally double-feeds then you will never be sure that you didn't miss a page and your throughput will be lowered to the speed that you can count pages. Scanners with a straight-through paper path tend to be more reliable. Some scanners have a rubber "tongue" that holds the sheets in place and prevents mis-feeding. I would recommend that you see a scanner in action before you buy it.

Scanning Software
Many scanners come with free scanning software. Make sure that it will produce PDF documents. PDF is the most universal format for documents. There are 3 main types of PDF documents.

Image-Only. Shows an image of each page. The text is not searchable.
Image-on-Text. Shows an image of each page. However it also stores the text and it can be searched using search tools.
Text-Only. Each page is composed of just text. (A bit like a read-only Word document).

You should only consider scanning your documents as Image-Only or Image-on-Text. These formats show an accurate representation of the original document and will be suitable for Tax purposes etc.
The PDF format belongs to Adobe, however it is an open-format and you can buy software from many vendors to create or modify PDF documents. You can view documents using the free Adobe Reader.

More notes on Scanning
Scan your documents as greyscale. While greyscale is slower than Black-and-White it has the advantage that it will capture all of the text and images on your documents. A lot of documents are in color these days. When you scan these in B&W the light colors will disappear completely. Color scans are far too big and your scanner will be very slow.
I recommend scanning at 300 dpi (dots per inch). This will give good image quality even if you view at large magnification. You only scan once but you will keep the document for many years. 300 dpi will also give you better results if you are using Optical Character Recognition (OCR) to produce Image-on-Text documents. Even if you don't do OCR today you could still use software later to convert your Image-Only PDF documents into Image-On-Text PDF documents.

Filing Your Documents
Create folders for each of your suppliers, customers, banks etc. Under each folder I usually create folders for 'Correspondence', 'Invoices', 'Checks' and 'Contracts'. Place your documents in the folders exactly as you would in a paper filing system.
Always name your documents. Even if you are creating searchable documents you should give each document a meaningful name. It's really unhelpful to open a folder and see 50 documents titled doc_01.pdf, doc_02.pdf. You'll have to open a lot of documents to find what you are looking for.
Tip: Prefix all of your document names with the date in yyyymmdd format. e.g. 20070922-cable bill.pdf. If you do this you will always be able to identify the date correctly. Using the windows file dates is not a good idea because you may not scan the document exactly when you got it or in the order that you received it. This method ensures that your documents will always sort correctly. You will avoid getting Jan 2001, Jan 2002 followed by Feb 2001, Feb 2002 etc.

Finding your Documents
You can use Microsoft desktop search or Google desktop search to find your documents. If you create Image-Only PDF documents you will only be able to search by the name of the file. So file naming discipline is really important. If you create Image-On-Text documents you will be able to find your documents by any words that are contained in them. If you have created Image-On-Text documents and you can't search by the document content then you may need to install a special filter for PDF files. This is called an iFilter for Microsoft Search and is called the PDFtoText utility for Google Desktop.
Tip: The indexing (search) service on windows XP is not installed by default. You'll need to go to "Control Panel"=>"Add or Remove Programs"=>"Add/Remove Windows Components" to enable it.

Backing up your Documents
Now that you have your documents stored on your computer you must back them up regularly. An external USB hard disk is a good way to do this. Make sure that you have two of them and keep one of them at another location (or at least in a fire-safe). If you do use two drives make sure that you do complete (not incremental) backups on each drive. USB drives tend to overheat so turn them off when you are finished backing up your data.

Postamble
For all businesses and many individuals going paperless is really worthwhile. Once you've got yourself set up it is actually less work to file and organize your records. You'll rest easy knowing that you have everything and that you can find it. If you're using full-text search you will be amazed at how well it works. It can truly transform your business.
This guide is just enough to get you started on your paperless journey.