April 21 2011
Guest contributor, GoPaperless Solutions, says:
For some, the paperless office is all about conservation and environmental protection. For many reasons conservation and protection are good ideas; therefore, so are paperless offices and paperless document management. For those not-so-tree-huggerish folks out there, for whom the paperless office has had no draw at all, it's definitely time to take a fresh look at this idea.
A paperless office can benefit the bottom line as much as it does lakes and streams. Sometimes a good idea is just, well, a good idea.
Four benefits of a paperless office include:
What happens when a client wants a hard copy?
Before the paperless office, the document had to be retrieved from the paper file system, copied on a copier and returned to the paper file system (where it could be misfiled). With a paperless office, the document is pulled up on the computer and sent to the printer. It doesn't get moved (or misfiled), bent, crinkled or have coffee spilled all over it. The copier, expensive to buy, use and maintain, no longer necessary. Same goes for the paper file system which can fill a large room in some companies – no longer necessary.
Consider another common office task: sending a fax. In a paperless office, faxes are sent directly from the PC over the Internet. This means everyone in the office can send faxes at the same time, more than one person can fax the same document to different recipients at the same time, and all this without an office fax machine! Faxes to a paperless office are likewise received over the Internet and do not require paper or toner. Furthermore, the people who send you faxes and the people who receive your faxes do not know that you are doing anything differently (although, the abnormally high quality of the faxes you send might be a giveaway). The faxes sent over the Internet look better since the document is not being scanned as it rolls through a fax machine. If the document was scanned well originally or created from scratch in Word, it looks outstanding.
Each paperless office has its own story to tell, and when your office is paperless, you will discover advantages unique to your office, work and procedures. Consider one other advantage common to all paperless offices, and that is a public relations one. Green is in right now, but smart and efficient never go out of style. Showing off your paperless office to current or potential clients is a great way to impress. It tells that client or prospect that you are looking for ways to keep your business lean and mean and that you leverage technology to do that. And, of course, the tree huggers might want to treat you like a tree.
Read the original blog as posted by GoPaperless.
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