Drowning in paper
- Elissa Baxter
- 3 September 2009
Your desk is clear, your bins are waste free, your office contains only a computer. You don't need pens, staplers, a photocopier or printer. There are no shelves, no in-trays and, most importantly, no filing cabinets.
Welcome to the paperless office: a mythical beast first envisioned, ironically, by photocopier company Xerox in the 1960s, and whose stubborn failure to materialise has not yet dimmed anyone's ambition that it should one day exist.
Is the paperless office a myth?
Despite the fact we all now have computers, smartphones and other devices that let us create, share and store documents electronically, paper continues to dominate modern offices as much (if not more) than it did in the late 1960s when golfball typewriters ruled the roost.
Why are workplaces so addicted to paper?
The answer is that paper is light, flexible, cheap, easy to read, easy to share and requires no technology to operate. Everyone knows how to use it and holding a piece of paper gives people a sense of security that electronic documents do not.
Paper can adapt to a huge variety of ways of being read: whether it's in depth reading like a novel, skimming or instantaneous, almost involuntary, reading. Knowing that people read in a number of different ways, businesses long ago adapted their paper products to suit their target audience.
“A major problem with using paper is cost – and buying paper is only a small part of the cost”
The ideal of the paperless office was therefore hampered by the fact that electronic documents were not adapted to humans in that way that paper products have been. Additionally, a paperless office relies on technology that, until recently, was expensive and not entirely reliable.
In recent years, however, technologies that allow paperless transactions have evolved to become more like paper, and readers have adapted to dealing with more on screen. But probably most importantly, those technologies have become ubiquitous.
Tipping point reached
Few people understand the slow progress of the paperless office idea better than Kurt Carlsen, co-founder of Australian document management software company Redmap
. In the 17 years since Redmap's launch, originally as an imaging bureau but now developed into a fully fledged digital document management
business, Carlsen has seen the impediments to paperless offices fall away.
"Ten years ago everything was stacked against us," Carlsen explains. "Back then 100 megabytes was a huge amount of storage, now you can buy a terabyte of data for $300. When we started, a decent reliable scanner would cost $40,000. A similar scanner now costs around $1,000."
Hardware costs were not the only barrier to running a paperless office: bandwidth was expensive making moving data from place to place unreliable and time consuming.
And documents stored electronically were not always in the same format for every reader. But changes in technology in the past few years have made the prospect of greatly reducing paper consumption and storage in an office something closer to reality.
"We found that about three years ago we reached a tipping point," says Carlsen. "All these factors came together, with costs coming down at the same time as people began to become aware of the damage paper causes to the environment."
Paper-Less for the planet
John Dee, co-founder of not-for-profit organisation Do Something
and co-founder of Planet Ark, is passionate about paper reduction for the
benefit of the environment. He formed the Paper-Less Alliance in conjunction with software companies including Redmap and Adobe, as well as device manufacturers like Toshiba, to alert businesses to the impact paper is having on the environment.
But according to Dee, there is a much more pressing business case for reducing paper than its impact on the planet: he says that paper imposes unnecessary and often unmeasured or hidden costs on business.
"Most people think ‘I've got a recycling bin' so they've dealt with the paper issue, but waste is only part of the problem," says Dee. "The push for the paperless office is about saving money. A major problem with using paper is cost.
And buying paper is only a small part of the cost of using paper.
"Storing, filing, finding, posting, and photocopying are all secondary costs of paper and the secondary costs substantially exceed the cost of paper itself."
Easy changes
The printer is the obvious place to start your effort to reduce paper use. One simple way to start thinking about reducing paper consumption is to find out exactly how much paper is being used, and by whom.
The Paperless Alliance offers a widget on its website which tracks paper use, letting managers see which parts of the business are the heaviest printer users. The widget is free for individuals and businesses with fewer than five employees.
Dee says that Australian businesses spend $4.2 billion annually just on business postage, and that cost alone should be enough to prompt every financial controller in the country to reconsider a paper reduction strategy.
"If you have a head of accounts who isn't looking to go paperless with billing, you need to look for a new head of accounts," says Dee.
Dee says that the accounts department is the place for many businesses to ‘pick the low hanging fruit' by making immediate and measurable savings.
Printing and posting bills to customers is both costly and time consuming, with large businesses like Telstra estimating that cost in the hundreds of millions of dollars each year.
Just as Telstra has recently announced its move to electronic billing, bringing it into line with many other large service providers, small businesses can also reap the benefits of moving to electronic accounts. Electronic bills save paper and postage, and electronic copies of bills can be indexed and searched instantly, and viewed by multiple members of staff at once.
Electronic sharing
In situations where documents are being reviewed by a number of people, old fashioned printed drafts with red-pen mark-ups are still common. In some offices, those draft copies can add up to hundreds of sheets of paper, all of which get scrapped before the document is finalised.
Many businesses could make significant paper savings by training their staff to use software such as Microsoft OneNote to collaborate on documents, or use the ‘Track changes' features built into most major word processing software.
Another option, Adobe's Acrobat file format allows document reviewers to enter markups and text changes electronically.
The digital filing cabinet
According to Dee the efficiencies of electronic filing and archiving of systems add another cost-saving dimension to the move towards a paperless office, allowing almost instant access to documents when they are needed rather than rifling through filing cabinets. Electronic archiving systems can also centralise the storage of documents that have been scanned or electronically created. as well as email, to make compliance more efficient as well.
The Australian National Audit Office, an extremely paper intensive business, creates around 6,000 new files per year, on top of its existing archive of 55,000 files. The ANAO estimates that it has made productivity savings of around $1.3 million each year by shifting to electronically stored documents, according to a case study on the Paper-Less Alliance website. As well as providing efficiencies for staff, the Audit Office says that staff no longer have to lug around heavy suitcases filled with documents to process their audit findings.
While small businesses are unlikely to have suitcases worth of documents, many handle thousands of pieces of paper each month. Many business processes rely on the accurate filing of that paper. When moving offices, all of that paper needs to be sorted and moved as well and in disaster situations like fire and flood, all that paper is vulnerable to irretrievable loss.
Security
Of course electronic files are also vulnerable to loss or theft because they are so easily copied and deleted. But while copying and archiving paper files is laborious and expensive, there are software systems available which allow businesses to back up their electronic files automatically and store them remotely for a relatively small annual fee.
This type of remote backup ‘in the cloud' has become more popular since the dramatic fall in the cost of storage and bandwidth and is now feasible for even the smallest business. Products like Carbonite and Mozy provide encrypted backs ups to
data centres in the United States. Local companies getting in on the act include Backup.com.au, Backup 24/7 and Quick Backup. These online backup firms provide a service that is easily
searchable and more secure than onsite backup systems which are vulnerable to physical threats like fire and flood.
Cost of going paperless
Taking the step towards a paperless office requires a certain investment in technology. Whether it is an investment in software that creates PDF bills, a back up service ‘in the cloud' or a fully functioning archiving database like those offered by Redmap, there will be an initial outlay.
But according to Redmap's Carlsen, businesses should see a return on investment within a year.
"It is very rare that our clients don't get a return on investment within 6-12 months," says Carlsen. "There are few technologies that pay for themselves within 12 months."
Carlsen says many businesses can start down the track towards paperless processes for an initial outlay of around $10,000 in software and equipment. But will this ever lead to a paper-free desk?
"We're not going to see it in my lifetime, and I plan to live a long time!" says Carlsen. "But it's quite conceivable that we will come close to having a paperless office."
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Five easy steps to use less paper in the office
- Track how much the business is printing and think about strategies to reduce that amount.
- Switch printers to double-sided printing and copying as a default.
- Make it company policy to share documents electronically.
- Don’t print email.
- Sign up to receive bills electronically wherever possible.
