Paper Work.

Some document-management solutions

Although the Great Paperless society has yet to materialize as prophesied decades ago, digital technology is helping to make at least some paper documents a thing of the past.

Imaging Office Systems Inc., headquartered in Fort Wayne, focuses entirely on document management, says John Trimble, vice president of sales in the Indianapolis office. "Some Hoosier businesses do a great job and others do a terrible job. They've automated every aspect of their business except their handling of paper.

"Solutions might range from conventional microfilming of records to a half-million-dollar imaging system," says Trimble. Recently, the company helped revamp the paper-flow system at Ball State University in Muncie. "Our system allows the university to image everything from financial documents to student transcripts. Now people who have the appropriate security clearance can retrieve those images on their network or through the Internet."

Another recent project was for Benicorp Insurance in Indianapolis. "We installed an imaging system that allows the firm to scan its insurance claim files," says Trimble. "This permits customer-service personnel to review the claim online and process it much more efficiently."

"It is nice to be able to basically store a whole filing cabinet on a single disk," says Don Parsons, vice president at Automated Office Solutions in Evansville. Parsons likes Novell's document-management system, partly because e-mails can be stored in a common storage area.

"We're also seeing more and more businesses going to intranets, whereby documents needed throughout the organization are posted on an internal server that is not necessarily accessed via the outside," Parsons says. But enhanced security is required. "I might want my pricing documentation available on an intranet, so people in my company can see how much we pay for something and how much we charge. This is information I would not necessarily want to share with customers."

VanAusdall & Farrar Inc. in Indianapolis sells a product from Optika called Acorde that permits image scanning and computer output to laser disk (COLD) and work flow. "These are common technologies that a lot of developers have adopted over the last decade," says manager Guillermo Fernandez. "COLD is a way of taking green-bar reports and putting them on a personal computer or a network, so people can search for data and bring the data up on their screen instead of receiving these piles of reports."

Making prudent use of e-mail can save reams of paper, says Jeff Gambaccini, field sales manager for HPS Office Systems in Indianapolis. "You no longer need to print 100 copies of something. Instead, you can e-mail it to 100 people, of which perhaps only 50 decide they need to print the e-mail."

Both Savin and Toshiba offer a version of scan-to-e-mail. "Companies can send information from a hard copy through the Internet rather than faxing it and incurring long-distance charges," Gambaccini conveys. Documents are scanned by the sender and received as an e-mail.

"In some cases, scan-to-e-mail is merely an additional component to a fax machine," he says. "It might also consist of a few items, including a circuit board, that are attached to a multifunctional machine such as a copier and printer."