re: Moving to a paperless office, your experiences

I used to be to just hand my patients their pw to fill out and I could go do other stuff. Now I have to sit down with them and click all the little boxes and then they sign the damned thing anyways.

Forget it. I work for a paperless company. I have twice the work now, as every piece of PAPER I receive I have to scan into my files on line and then I still have the mountains of paper. Paperless? Really? The more accurate term is not paperless but LessPaper.

First thing you should do is sit down and decide what you want a paperless system to do for you? Do you want built in workflow for docs inside your office etc?

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OneDrive

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Sucks balls. Microsoft doesn't even use it internally.

Stay away from anything from Oracle.


Talk to someone who knows Share point. You can get licenses with Office 365 E3 plans. We use it internally at our office for different teams collaborating.

Again clearly define your goals and objectives first.

Stratman gets it.

This is all the fault of the irresponsible "print every GD email I get" idiots. Some would love to print emails 5 pages long of numerous re:'s, glance at it, then toss it in the trash can. Others would print a 256 page, single sided .pdf manual of some piece of equipment that they only needed to read one paragraph of the entire document. Further, there are those types that would print every product sales' page when looking to order parts online. I could go on and on about the waste.

Should have gone paperless a decade ago

OP is right. Paperless leads scanning important docs, which is more work and still have paper every where. My office may call it paperless, but it just means we don't keep certain docs in house.

This topic fascinates me. I wanted to reply in detail but have too much to say from all the stuff I've looked at.

Here's the BLUF for me:
The key to paperless is archiving and retrieving.
Paper still wins in many different ways.
Doc mgmt is still incomplete and incompatible with available tech.
Many communications methods such as email are poorly suited.
Still a couple more developments in tech needed.
Best solution right now is to use paperless routing and implement digital signatures, that is a $0 expense and will immediately reduce paper costs.

ETA - if you are close to a university you may be able to team up with people in the business school and computer science departments and give them access to your firm for them to write manuscripts for publication regarding office efficiency, paperless etc, and in return they may agree to distill all they've learned on the topic to help you figure this out moving forward.

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Forget it. I work for a paperless company. I have twice the work now, as every piece of PAPER I receive I have to scan into my files on line and then I still have the mountains of paper. Paperless? Really? The more accurate term is not paperless but LessPaper.

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This is a real problem. The other problem is all the copy/paste so it's all in your OneNote file or whatever. It really adds up.

We are paperless, especially in terms of storage and document retention. We have a printer but only use it when we need to sign and mail documents. We used to use Worldox but now organize and store all docs in Prolaw.