I recently worked in an office that was by far the most disorganized space that I had ever had the misfortunate in which to (attempt to) work. There were file cabinets upon file cabinets crowding the hallways – into which papers were haphazardly filed in a mishmash system that it was doubtful anyone understood. And if those file cabinets weren’t enough – already blocking the hallways in a bulky display that was both inefficient and unattractive – there were papers strewn across desks everywhere that you looked. It was a just a mess. If I had a nickel for every time I heard someone lamenting their loss of this paper or that, I would have been rich within the space of a month. And it just didn’t make any sense to me considering that the office operated almost entirely online; we all had computers which were supposed to give us a more organized and efficient operating platform. But trying to combine the old and new way of doing things was only serving to make things that much more disorganized.

At some point, when I felt comfortable enough with management to voice my opinion, I suggested that the company investigate the services of a document scanning professional that could essentially help them take all their paper documents and put them into electronic files that they could work with more readily. This would also eliminate the need for the file cabinets that were only serving to clutter the already burgeoning space and I told them that they would find the information that they were saving would be saved more effectively in terms of keeping it safe from damage and loss.

Initially the big concern was how the operation of a document scanning company would affect our operations, and, of course, the price of such a service. But I showed them the research that I had done; some of the top document scanning companies would perform their service in their offices or in their clients’ offices – whatever was more convenient; and the project would be completed in a fast, efficient, and organized manner so that daily operations were not impeded. As far as the price, it was competitive, and besides – I countered – how much would we wind up spending in legal fees for failing to produce documents for compliancy purposes when were unable to find those documents in our own file cabinets?

In the next post, I’ll provide an update on how the document scanning process worked in our company.

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