It’s not just Al Gore. We could all do a bit better with the environment. A big offender is the use of paper for printing.

Once its printed, we probably stack it somewhere so it can attract dust. Let no desk surface be uncovered!

Then, we wonder where that dang printout of the schedule went. Didn’t I print it just the other day?

Well, wake up! There are easier ways to manage your docs and then find what you need.

I learned my lesson when I decided to sell TransDigital. We accumulated paper in all forms: plain ol’ wasted paper, signed contracts, technical specs for projects, project status updates, and so on. The prospect of physically moving all of it was not enticing. So, right after selling, we bought an eFax account and faxed it all to ourselves. This allowed us to do the following:

• Recycle the paper
• Organize all our important company documents and quickly recall them
• Store all company documents electronically
• Quit worrying about the “act of God” issues: flood, fire, etc.

I still follow the practice of scanning all important documents (home and work). It’s simplified my life.

Your company can do exactly what I did or do it a little more professionally. There are companies that exist to scan, sort, and store documents. (If you are using them, then this post is skippable!). There is also software that can help you with this.

We sell a system called Teleform (retails at $8000/desktop scanning station). It helps companies manage documents and is one of the industry leaders. When you combine a system like Teleform with internal processes, you can achieve the type of benefits I did. We manage all our POs, signed contracts, policies, etc through scanning systems.

If you are growing rapidly, you should look into software to help you manage the paper, routing documents, and develop a retention policy. Otherwise, you’ll end up buying a lot of filing cabinets, wasting employee time looking for documents, and being frustrated.

Some resources:

Amdoc , Teleform, VeBridge