I am an information junkie. Actually I’m an information hoarder, which is probably an obsessive–compulsive disorder (OCD). There’s probably a twelve step program for people like me.
My problem is I’ll read something and think “that information might be useful someday,” so I save it. Sometimes it is useful. Sometimes not. The problem is which is which is virtually impossible to predict.
What does this have to do with going paperless?
About 4 years ago I was staring at 4 five drawer filing cabinets of my “good stuff.” They were getting too full to keep adding more “good stuff” to.
I had just gotten a new Canon MF5550 multi-function laser printer/copier/scanner/fax/coffee maker (ok coffee making wasn’t included), so I thought why not just scan all that “good stuff?” The MF5550 has a sheet feeder so I’d just load up a stack and hit scan, then move to the next stack.
That lasted about an hour and less than a couple of inches of paper. Turns out the MF5550 actually took almost a minute to scan a 8 ½ x 11” piece of paper and it only scanned one side of the page at a time, so I had to feed each stack through the scanner twice. I gave up.
A month or two later I got an email from one of my “deals” sites offering a Fujitsu ScanSnap 430 for a very good price. The ScanSnap 430 was a sheet fed scanner about the size of a toaster that scanned both sides of a sheet of paper at a rate of 20 pages per minute. A week later the box arrived and mission back on.
If I were buying that scanner now, I’d buy the ScanSnap S1500 (http://rclinks.us/techbit64), which has even better paper handling than my older version.
It took me two weekends watching Law and Order marathons to scan the contents of my filing cabinets (it’s handy to have something relatively mindless to do in between feeding the scanner).
I’ve set up enough filing systems to know that it doesn’t pay to make them too complicated—you can spend more time deciding where to put a file than creating it. My scanned documents filing system was pretty simple. Each filing cabinet drawer became a sub-directory under the cleverly named directory “Scanned Documents.” The ScanSnap can be set up to scan directly into a PDF file, so each I canned each file folder into a single PDF. Rather than take the time to type a name for each file, I let the ScanSnap software just use the date/time it was scanned, its default setting.
Of the 20 file drawers of documents, about 2 were of legal significance, so I’ve keep the originals. The rest went into a local recycling collection bin.
Of course if I was looking for something going through a hundred files with filenames like 2006_05_24_10_23_11.pdf isn’t really too convenient. But I really couldn’t justify the time needed to actually name each file with a useful filename. Plus even though I might have named that file “AIM/R Board Minutes for August 27 1999” I might not remember that was the meeting was the one we discussed the new association website.
The solution was simple. I used a copy of Abbyy FineReader 8 I had to OCR the scanned files. A free alternative is FreeOCR, http://www.paperfile.net/. I used the batch conversion mode to create a .TXT file with the same filename as the original scanned file. I might use Abbyy FineReader 10’s ability to convert a PDF into a searchable PDF, putting the converted text in a layer behind the image, but its HotFolder function has a “feature” that creates a new sub-sub-directory with the single output file that really messes things up.
Then using either Windows Desktop Search or Google Desktop Search I could find the file(s) that contain the keywords I am looking for, and from the resulting .TXT filenames I know which PDF file to look in.
That first sprint of scanning took 40, 153 pages of documents and reduced them to a searchable, portable version of my filing cabinets.
Since then, most of the “good stuff” I find gets scanned, filed and indexed. What I have found is a lot of things I would normally have made copies of, and then thrown away later, I never bother copying. I just scan them. I don’t know how many reams of paper I have saved over the years. Most copies are made “just in case” and are rarely used. As of now, my 40,153 pages has grown to 118,089 pages and takes up about 35 GB of storage on a network drive.
Why should you care about my OCD hoarding of information? Think about your business.
Our manufacturers’ representative agency had 22 four drawer cabinets we stored copies of every customer order and invoice. We had a part time employee just for filing (although it was nice work for my kids). And at the end of each year we spent a week transferring all those files to storage boxes which went into the warehouse, usually never looked at again (but just often enough we dare not throw the files away at the end of the year.).
If I had a business with customer records now, I’d have one or more ScanSnaps, likely one at each employee’s desk. Any incoming paperwork would be scanned and filed in a subdirectory with the customer’s name. Since our files were kept in more/less chronological order, the using dates for filenames would accomplish the same task. Then anyone could look up anything about any customer, without even getting up from their desk. Instead of using multiple part forms, I’d have the warehouse scan the packing slip showing what was actually shipped just before they put it on the customer’s shipment.
I am convinced without using a potentially costly document management system we could find any customer’s information just as quickly as a trip to the filing cabinet. We’d save on time spent filing and end of year clean up. I’m confident the return on investment, even buying a $450 ScanSnap S1500 for each employee, would be far less than a year.
Plus it would make my environmentally conscious daughter happy.
