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How to get a paperless office

610i8033C4525BDB8621Kevin Garcia has written a great article for Inc. Magazine with a number of tips for turning your office into a paperless office. Kevin began by noting that the average office worker uses 10,000 sheets of copy paper every year and if you multiply that figure by the number of employees you have, its easy to see how a paperless office can save your business money. Moreover, Kevin noted that electronic records are far cheaper to store than paper records and far easier to search through, saving you time.

 

However, Kevin then pointed out that one of your biggest challenges will be to figure out what to do with all of your existing paper records as it will be important to determine how many of these records actually need to be stored due to certain retention requirements or for other reasons. Kevin also pointed out that the second big challenge will be getting all employees to buy into the process as employee support will be the key in deciding what paperwork is important to your business and what paperwork is not important.

 

Kevin then came up with the following suggested timeline to turn your office into a paperless one:

  1. Set a deadline.
  2. Hire an outside firm and buy new equipment.
  3. Replace your invoices.
  4. Store key documents.
  5. Identify your "super-users."

At the end of the article, Kevin noted that switching to a paperless office can be a daunting task and it will also need to be a company wide initiative. Hence, he noted the importance of identifying tech-fluent employees in each and every department who can help ease the transition for their less tech-fluent coworkers. Finally, Kevin ended his article by noting two great resources for paperless offices:

 

Comments
Itaz Document(anon) | ‎11-13-2010 11:53 AM

Organizations worldwide plan to reduce the amount of paper they consume, but when it comes to executing the plan, they find it difficult.

With a good document management system in place, they could easily achieve their goals of going paper free, besides enjoying several other benefits.

 

Working with less paper is not difficult. Consider Globodox at www.itaz.com

 

Medium-to-large enterprises will save hours spent on filing and retrieving documents if they use Globodox. We are so confident about it that we guarantee you’ll save paper on World Paper Free Day using Globodox!

Matthew | ‎11-15-2010 07:52 AM

Thanks for the suggestion. Digital document management is definitely a good way to reduce paper waste and move towards a paperless office.

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About the Author
  • Matthew Stibbe is CEO at Articulate Marketing and TurbineHQ. He is an HP fanboy.
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