To my surprise, we had printed 350,000 paper copies of sales reports that year. I asked for a copy of every paper form we used. The thick binder that landed on my desk contained hundreds and hundreds of forms. Using our intranet to replace paper forms has produced striking results for us. We have reduced the number of paper forms from more than 1,000 to a company-wide total of 60 forms.
Companies talk about rewarding initiative and keeping workers focused on business.
An acquaintance of mine had an uncle who spent 25 years at an auto plant in Flint, Mich., tacking chrome strips and other finish parts onto automobiles. Having people focus on whole processes allows them to tackle more interesting, challenging work. Teams are tight, autonomous units. Each team has a specific function, such as building engines or doors, and each team member is trained to do approximately 30 different jobs in that area, so that people don't get stale from doing repetitive tasks. Through a Web interface, the worker can retrieve data from a database, automatically load the data into a spreadsheet and pivot through the data to analyze it by part and type of problem.