Can my mobile phone help me better manage my paper?

Is there really an app for that? Well that depends on what you need to do. You might think that just because there are many scanning apps available for your smartphone and tablet that (scanning) taking a picture using your device camera is the answer to the more efficient management of paper. I say taking a picture because it really is a different technology to the traditional document scanner (I should write about that another time…. It’s on the list!).

Check out this great review and comparison by PC Mag.

The Best Mobile Scanning Apps of 2016 - PC Mag

So is this really the answer?

As I said the answer really depends on what you want to achieve. The cloud makes apps like Evernote Scannable and CamScanner very useful tools. For a start they have cool technology that takes the best picture (scan) of the document possible given the condition of the document and the environment, there are no “user” chances been taken here!   And secondly you’re already on the doorstep of the cloud where magic really does happen. Some of these app’s now come with OCR (check out my acronym page) which makes them searchable, they really have come a long way.

That’s all great I hear you say but what are the drawbacks?

As long as your need is for casual scanning when you’re on the go then there really are no drawbacks but as good as they are smartphone app’s are not a solution to managing your business documents. Likely you'll just have far too many pieces of paper and you really don’t have the time to take a picture of every single one.

If you have a strategy for better managing paper then you need the right tools for the job. Taking individual pictures of pieces of paper is so time consuming that the novelty will have worn off after a day or two. What you really need is a sheet fed scanner that can just scan multiple documents freeing you up for your real job.

But what about when I’m out and about?

Well why not, but don’t forget there are plenty of small wireless scanners available now that will scan directly to your mobile device. Mobile scanning apps are you are also limited by the camera in your mobile phone and of course your device battery life.

That said some of the mobile scanning apps are great for business card or receipt capture and if that’s all you need then why not!

The last word.

Your mobile phone can do a bit of everything now. I would suggest that a mobile scanning app is a great back up for your real scanning solution just in the same way as you wouldn’t rely on your mobile phone camera as the only way to take your vacation photo’s or instead of using the sat nav in your car.

Scanning apps are great for adhoc capture but they really earn their worth when they are integrated into other functions like recording the label on a great bottle of wine or for reading QR codes.

Maybe Scanning just got easier!

Maybe Scanning just got easier!

Imagine that all you had to do was put your paper documents in a scanner, press a button and everything would be automatically scanned, cleaned, cropped and rotated. That would be amazing right? Well, thats been a reality for some time now.

But imagine if all of that happened and your documents were automatically sorted in the cloud and despatched to the relevant cloud service. Crazy stuff, I know but just take a look at this video.

Fujitsu ScanSnap Cloud has the answer!

There is no excuse now for you not to manage your documents. All you have to do is get them as far as the scanner and let the magic happen!

The paper burden in Small Business.

Sound familiar?

There’s paper everywhere but I can never find the information I need. Come on what have I done with it! Argh...I must have thrown it away, or maybe I left it at home. I’ll have to go through this pile again! It must be in the filing cabinet, maybe it’s in my car. Really guys how much time do you have for this!

Scanning Paper

It really isn’t rocket science but please do take some care, you need to have a strategy! If you just scan paper you’ll be moving the problem from being a visible burden into an invisible and potentially disastrous situation.

So what should I do!

Set aside an hour or two, grab a cup of coffee and think! Think about the paper that you have now. Where does it come from, what do you do with it, how long do you really need to keep, but most importantly does it actually have any value?

Right what now?

Don’t try and fix the problem all in one go, you lived with this for long enough so give yourself time to get your strategy right! Start with the really important stuff.  Think small steps. 

I’m ready what do I do now?

Slow down, you’re not ready yet. You have to spend some money, it’s not for free. The good news however is that it doesn’t have to cost the earth. There are many different products and solutions but to make it easy here are two choices.

Simple

Yes, this will be for most of you, as you don’t have time for complex and you are the IT department. Buy a ScanSnap, it’s a full solution. Don’t take my word for it (SPOILER ALERT – I do have an interest here) go to AMAZON in any country and read the reviews.

Slightly more Complex

Ok, first of all set aside time for some real research. Assuming you already have a computer you need to buy just two things, a scanner (don’t buy a flatbed scanner – life is far too short for that) and some Document Management Software. Relax, it doesn’t have to be too hard you’re not an intrepid explorer going where no man has gone before but you do have to invest some time here. If you’re in a paper intensive line of work, accountancy, legal, medicine there are plenty of packages available that are customised for your environment, we’ve just narrowed the search considerably already. If not then google is your friend!

Little Steps again.

Whichever way you decide to go, don’t forget small steps. Focus on developing your strategy for different types of documents. Why don’t you start with your expenses and receipts then move on to customer correspondence, Rome wasn’t built in a day!

Take the first little step today.

Whoops, sorry your honour we shredded those by mistake!

More than 2,000 Alberta Court of Appeal records were accidentally shredded last year, says a provincial spokeswoman.

Boxes containing statements of fact and notice of motions were being transported to the Provincial Archives in Edmonton by Service Alberta when they were destroyed in July 2011, said Michelle Davio, spokeswoman for Alberta Justice. The 2,100 destroyed records were from criminal and civil cases from 1993 to 1995.

The records were with other files marked for destruction, said Gerald Kastendieck, spokesman for Service Alberta. "This is obviously an inadvertent destruction of those records."

Oh dear, but at least lessons learnt! Accidents happen but risks associated with inadvertently destroying paper can be mitigated with simple digital conversion.

http://tiny.cc/hh64iw

The FBI goes paperless

Well, it's only taken 12 years and $600m but finally the FBI has introduced electronic case records for all it's 36,000 employees. That's a lot less paper and I'm sure a more effective use of data, beware criminals the FBI have become even more efficient.

Sentinel, the agency’s all-digital system, features a web browser-style user interface that allows agents to enter and review information about cases or suspects. Agents can do quick searches to see if one of their cases has any similarities to other cases, an improvement which should speed up investigations. Additionally, agents can electronically sign documents using an identification badge reader.

Certain elements of Sentinel have been in use by FBI agents for months, but the agency made the full switch to digital filing last month. The software sees about 20,000 users a day.

“The deployment of Sentinel is an important step forward for FBI’s information technology,” said FBI Director Robert S. Mueller in an e-mailed statement.

Check out their press release: http://www.fbi.gov/news/pressrel/press-releases/fbi-announces-deployment-of-sentinel

Disaster recovery – have you got everything covered?

Guess what, paper has no inherent provision for disaster recovery! Whilst many organisations have spent considerable time and effort planning for the worst the “elephant in the room” appears to be paper records and paper based processes.

So, whilst in many cases organisations might claim that they can have key personnel functioning in an offsite replica of their business with virtualised applications and recovered electronic content very few have made any contingency for paper.

The cold hard fact is that if a paper record is destroyed by fire, flood or any other natural disaster that it is the end of that record, there exists no recovery point.

One common miss-conception is that by storing important paper records in an off-site paper warehouse is in some way a disaster recovery policy for paper. This is totally erroneous as whilst many of these vast paper warehouses have very careful climate controlled areas with state of the art fire deterrents they are not unassailable. You may recall an incident in London some years back when fire damage destroyed millions of records at a well known paper storage business.

I’m sure that citing a fire or flood is not a legally acceptable reason for being unable to disclose a record, and in our litigious society that can amount to significant loss.

The truth is that if you have important content on paper that’s not backed up or managed in some sort of EDMS (Electronic Document Management System) you cannot really have a complete disaster recovery plan in place.

Content is content whether it’s paper or electronic, if it’s important you need to make provisions for it just in case the worst should happen.

Physical Protection:

2 out of 5 companies who experience disaster are out of business within 5yrs if they even if they have a plan(Gartner)

Business suffering incapacitating disaster with no DRP (Disaster Recovery Plan):

Ø  only 43% resume operations

Ø  of 43%, 29% still in business in 2 years

Ø  total of 71% out of business in 2 years

(Contingency Planning Research)

Minimise the risk of paper and convert to electronic content where replication can be managed.

Is there an environmental benefit to scanning our documents?

We’ve used paper for thousands of years, we’re not going to give up now; right? Some of the most important moments of our life are recorded on paper. Our birth, marriage and death certificate are all paper form. Important transactions such as signing the deeds to your new property or voting in a general election are all legacy paper based processes. We still send 58M letters in the UK every day, most of us still receive paper based invoices and pay slips and how many of us really sign up for electronic statements from our banks.

Most businesses big and small still use paper for some of their most crucial business processes, many still file and store (or sub contract the storage) documents in large quantities often much longer than is absolutely necessary. Aside from the operational efficiencies derived from “scan to process” and the obvious cost savings to be gained from reducing the “Paper Mountains” is there really a positive environmental impact to be gained from scanning paper?

Well clearly had we not of created the documents in the first place there would be no need to scan them, but as mentioned it’s almost impossible to change the delinquent habits learned over thousands of years.

The environmental benefits are there, it’s all about “breaking the cycle” or “truncating the paper process”, in simple terms it’s more of a philosophical argument. The earlier in the process we can capture paper the less likely it is to be copied aimlessly for distribution. The best way to get over the dependency on paper is to eliminate it as quickly as possible, we need to change the way we work. Creating a new business philosophy is no easy task. Making it unacceptable to use a printer is not realistic for most businesses, but by providing employees with small desktop scanners and encouraging them to scan rather than print is laying the foundations for reducing your environmental footprint. By reducing the amount we print we are positively affecting the environment as follows:

a)   We use less (expensive) ink and toner, aside from the noxious chemicals in these products the actual cartridge is nearly always made from plastic. A significant amount of oil is used to produce these cartridges and even though a lot can now be recycled still every year hundreds of millions of cartridges go to landfill.

b)   We can hugely reduce the amount of paper we use. How often do we print documents only to throw them away the same day?

c)    Printers use a lot of energy.

Paper consumption

Research has suggested that the average worker prints six wasted pages per day, equating to 1,410 wasted pages per year which for a 10,000 employee organisation would equate to over 1,500 trees. (Xerox - Creating Sustainable Value)

The amount of wood and paper we throw away each year is enough to heat 50 million homes for 20 years. (www.thegoodhuman.com)

Though paper recovery rates in the US have increased in recent years, paper still represents one of the biggest components of solid waste in landfills – 26 million tons (or 16% of landfill solid waste) in 2009. When paper decomposes in a landfill, it releases methane, a greenhouse gas 23 times more potent than carbon dioxide. (http://www.forestethics.org/paper-the-facts)

There are over 4 trillion paper documents in the U.S. alone and they are growing at a rate of 22% per year. (PricewaterhouseCoopers)

We throw away 45% of our print outs within 24 hours. (Taevs, Debra. “Recycling’s Pushed ‘Reduce, Reuse’ Out of Equation.” Portland Metro Sustainable Industries Journal.)

Consumption of Tree’s

One tree yields 8,333 sheets of paper or 500 sheets (one ream) = 6% of a tree! (www.conservatree.com)

40% of the world's industrial logging goes into making paper, and this is expected to reach 50% in the near future. (http://www.forestethics.org/paper-the-facts)

Nearly 4 billion trees worldwide are cut down each year for paper, representing about 35 percent of all harvested trees. (http://www.ecology.com/2011/09/10/paper-chase/)

Energy consumption

Paper production is the third most energy-intensive of all manufacturing industries, using over 12% of all energy in the industrial sector. The paper and pulp industry is also the fourth largest emitter of greenhouse gases in the manufacturing sector. (http://www.forestethics.org/paper-the-facts)

Production of 1 ton of copy paper uses 11,134 kWh (same amount of energy used by an avg household in 10 months) (http://calculator.environmentalpaper.org/home)

Water consumption

Making one single sheet of copy paper can use over 13oz. of water– more than a typical soda can. (Clean Technologies in U.S. Industries: Focus on the Pulp and Paper Industry." United States-Asia Environmental Partnership, September 1997)

The water footprint of printing and writing paper is estimated to be between 300 and 2600 m3/ton (2-13 litres for an A4 sheet). (The green and blue water footprint of paper products: Methodological considerations and quantification by P.R. van Oel and A.Y. Hoekstra July 2010)

So, yes there is an environmental impact to scanning and removing paper as early as possible in the process. Scanning and managing our documents electronically is not just about saving money or improving our productivity it is also an essential component to a very viable green strategy!