Articles from SBL - Information at your doorsteps.

SBL - Article by P. Pradeep Kumar

The business market is always looking for one key thing - innovation

Business offices are looking forward to a near-paperless world where we wouldn’t need any paper forms, no need to write out leave applications and material/maintenance requisition forms, etc will be redundant. It is a dream we have been spoken about before — the paperless office should have been a reality by now — it hasn’t happened as yet but we are certainly nearing a turning point.

Do you remember the talk of the "paperless office" and predictions that the advent of the internet and the email would radically bring down the use of paper especially inside offices? Has it really happened?

Seattle Post-Intelligencer columnist Bill Virgin says "It's a brave e-world, but paper is still king".

People send messages and documents and access endless information from websites all day. E-commerce allows us to shop for ourselves and our businesses from a computer, without even needing a catalog.

But still paper rules the roost.

While the use of paper may have declined in some areas and the way paper is used has changed, overall when you look around the probability is that there are still scraps of paper lying around you, some of them waiting to be laboriously filled out.

But it's not quite business as usual for the paper industry, because there are evidences of new trends and forces that promise to reshape the industry. Businesses and consumers will change their habits over time, new technologies will emerge, the use of existing technologies will change, and as that happens some paper products will fall from favor while some will enjoy growth.

SBL, a software development company, is on the verge of that innovation now.

Features of the software are

1. No technical expertise is required to use this software

2. PCs having any hardware configuration and operating system can be a terminal, even thin clients (with minimum configuration) can be used as terminals.

3. Management can avail all information on anything such as personnel, work deployment, project status, customer communications, accounts, material requirement, material flow, etc with high degree of accuracy, information security, and hierarchical access control, from any where in the world which facilitates the company to manage all it's resources efficiently.

The motivation behind this idea includes a number of factors like productivity gains, costs savings, space saving, the need and ease of sharing information. Another important motivation for focusing on developing software technology that reduces the use of paper is the concept of environment protection. When the consumption of paper decreases millions of trees around the world are saved. And we earthlings can keep our green envelope for at least some more time.

According to the company what produces the greatest headache for staff is wasting time filling out paper forms and waiting to pass it on to the right personnel and they want to reduce the clutter.

You have to agree with them. Just take a look at how many messages are stored in your e-mail inbox. Now imagine how much paper would have been generated if they hadn't come to you from cyberspace.

A lot of companies have already made at least a partial shift to a paperless office. Some of the steps being followed are: by using scanners instead of copying machines, sending electronic faxes instead of paper faxes, storing information electronically instead of in filing cabinets, giving clients their output through CDs or Internet attachments instead of bound folders.

But companies like SBL have a wider vision.

SBL is in the process of implementing this software for a paperless office- something that could become mainstream. Others, including Microsoft founder Bill Gates, have been saying this for a decade, but now it is finally becoming a reality. In a future office we may carry all our information on this software.

But will paper ever go out of vogue.

Nah!

After all we still love that new book smell.

And just think of all the wonderful photos, inventive brochures and touching greeting cards we use all the time.

All of that stuff made from -- you got it – paper!

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