Why enterprises aren’t paperless yet

Enterprises may have green initiatives to reduce paper, but going paperless isn't one of them.

"I rarely find any big business that says they are going to be entirely paperless," said Jim Murphy, research director at Boston-based AMR Research Inc.

OCM Manufacturing Inc. started moving from a paper-based to electronic system for managing and maintaining data over five years ago.

The initiative began as an effort to create an electronic version of the quality system OCM uses to maintain compliance with ISO9000, explained George Henning, VP of manufacturing.

Nearly all documentation within the company is electronic, including change notices and requests, non-conformance reports, procedural instructions, drawings and bills of material.

"It's great," said Henning. "Whenever we have a revision, we just replace the controlled copy and notify people that a change is made. We make an archive of the old copy, so we have a history of the change, but we no longer have to round up all sorts of hard copies."

Inbound paper documents, such as invoices and packing slips, are scanned into the system and recycled.

But despite OCM's success at reducing paper within the organization, the Ottawa-based electronics contract manufacturer isn't paperless.

"If you come into the office, you'll still see paper here," said Henning.

Employees post paper on the walls of their cubicles, paper comes in from suppliers and there are books and manuals in paper format, he pointed out. External clients may request hard copies of documents such as test records or certificates of compliance.

To become an entirely electronic office, enterprises would have to remove some of the issues external partners and customers, noted Murphy.

"The paperless office is still a myth," said George Goodall, senior research analyst at Info-Tech Research Group Inc.

Boxes of files are disappearing from storage rooms and warehouses, but the piles of paper stacked on desks aren't going away, he said.

"Despite these advances in the records room, our day-to-day life will still include a lot of paper. It has a lot of advantages: it's persistent, we can stack and move it, and we can scribble on it with a pencil. It will be every difficult for digital tools to replace it," said Goodall.

Some employees like to print and cross-check with a pen and keep a hard copy at their desk in case something happens to their computer, said Henning. "You just have to work at educating them that the backups are well-managed and reliable," he said.

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