Setting Up a Paperless Office

Early in 1992, Larry L. Clark, vice-president and controller of Chaparral Steel Co. in Midlothian, Texas, realized his company was awash in paper. Clark suggested the company consider moving toward a paperless office. The goal was to convert all new paper documents and some of the old ones into electronic images and eventually close a warehouse clogged with old documents--invoices, purchase orders, accounting reports, tax records--without losing access to the information they contained. With a computerized system, it was reasoned, all the company's past and future documents could be stored in a fraction of the space needed for paper files. Such a system would allow his staff to gain access to images of the documents almost instantly, no matter how hard they were to identify. Management approved the move--by paper memo, of course. Two years later, the project is well under way, saving the company money and improving operations. The company, a subsidiary of Texas Industries, Inc., operates a high-technology mill that produces bar and structural steel by recycling scrap. Its parent is a Fortune 500 company. MAKING DECISIONS Right from the start Clark realized that no off-the-shelf imaging and retrieval product perfectly suited the finance department's needs because in addition to converting paper to electronic images, he wanted to automate the paperwork flow. As a result, he had no choice but to cobble together a computerized system. At Chaparral, as in many other companies, documents move from one department to another, with various actions taken along the way. For example, a requisition is created and forwarded to management for approval. Then it moves to the purchasing department, which creates a purchase order. When the goods are received, a receiving report is created and forwarded to the accounting department for matching with the invoice and for subsequent filing and payment. The goal was to integrate this part of the operation into the system. Clark sought support from his staff--the people who would use the system. Five departments (credit, purchasing, general accounting, treasury and cost accounting) with about 35 people report to him. Initially, some staff members were skeptical and resistant to change. Clark decided to win them over by involving them as much as possible: by keeping them aware of what was going on, including them in planning and decision making and providing comprehensive training in the use of the technology. The approach worked: The employees' resistance faded and they even began to boast how easy it was to locate accounting documents. "The new system clearly beats the old way of storing and retrieving documents," said Karen Dennis, a senior administrator who manages the system. One of the most important decisions to be made initially, Dennis explained, was how to organize the filing system and the indexing scheme--the database that would locate and retrieve all the documents. It became clear that success hinged on document retrieval--how each document would be coded for searches. Developing an indexing system, they soon realized, was as important as the planning that went into setting up a chart of accounts. Unfortunately, when the company first launched the system, the indexing scheme was designed as if the accounting and purchasing departments were two separate entities because that's the way business had been done in the past. As a result, some documents were "lost" in the system and some attempts to link related documents--for example, purchase requisitions to purchase orders to receiving reports to invoice to check--were futile. When the staff reconsidered the indexing system, it decided on a design that organized the documents using "file cabinets," "drawers" and "folders" (for more on this approach, see "The Paperless Office," page 73). All the departments received their own file cabinets in the system's electronic storage space. …

Field of study: Business