Paperwork Problems? -- Paperwork Solutions!

I can't find it.

It must be misfiled.

We lost the file.

The drawing is missing.

Who had it last?

What did you do with it?

Sound familiar? Chances are you heard one of these lines around your office, in your dealership or on the manufacturing floor at least once today. Right?

Despite all the technological achievements of the computer world, we manage to create more paper than we ever thought possible. The paperless office was ... and is ... a myth. As a society we seem to have a never ending desire to print, copy and save a tremendous amount of paperwork that often brings us to our knees when we try to conduct business.

Is there any hope that we can actually control our own destiny when it comes to handling customer orders, correspondence, employee records, financial in-formation, service logs or engineering drawings? The answer is YES !

We are all in the information business. We can't run our business without information. We can't make decisions without information. We can't respond to our customer's without information and we can't make engineering changes without information.

Technology should not be the driving force behind the desire to improve the flow of information in your organization. The application, based on your requirements, should dictate the media and technology that will be used.

In the exciting world of document management systems, solutions to paperwork problems can be found in two technologies - microfilm and digital imaging. Both systems allow you to capture, index, store, retrieve and distribute information in a non-paper environment.

I will review the technologies that may be excellent candidates for changing the way you handle your paperwork.

MICROFILM

Microfilm allows us to take a picture of each document and identify its location on a particular roll of film. Industry standard 16MM microfilm will hold approximately 2,500 8.5" X 11" standard office documents - that's the equivalent of a typical file drawer in a four or five drawer file cabinet.

Each frame, or document, will contain an image mark (blip) and a frame number that will later be used to prepare a computerized index to help users find documents. The index is called a CAR (computer-assisted-retrieval) system, and interfaces with a plain paper microfilm reader-printer.

With this type of system, you can find any document, using a variety of index criteria, in less than ten seconds.

In the world of manufacturing, we protect large format documentation (engineering drawings) through the use of the aperture card. An aperture card is an 80 column tab card that holds a piece of 35MM microfilm. Each card is a unitized record of your engineering information and is keypunched to identify critical drawing information such as part number, revision, and number of sheets.

Again, it is an important information medium that should be considered to back-up your valuable engineering drawings. Even if you have employed sophisticated CAD systems, you should still back-up on microfilm. The rapid pace of technological changes in computer hardware and peripheral devices can not assure future compatibility for the systems you install today. Microfilm is an eye-readable media that can easily be reproduced on a variety of reader-printers and even a photographic enlarger if required.

The aperture card can also be scanned to create a raster file of each drawing for easy viewing in an electronic imaging system. Raster scanned images can also be converted to vector files for importing into your CAD system.

Microfilm is still one of the most cost effective storage and retrieval options available today. This technology has been around for almost fifty years. Many people have a negative reaction when we mention microfilm be-cause they remember the older systems that utilized dry silver paper (grey on grey) or a wet electrostatic process (drip, drip). The microfilm industry took a back seat to electronic imaging the past five to ten years and did not do a very good job of explaining the benefits of the new systems that use standard plain paper, the same as your office copier.

Microfilm provides you with a legal and archival copy of every document in your company. Duplicate rolls of microfilm or aperture cards are stored in an off-site protected environment to assure that you can reconstruct your business in the case of a disaster.

Lack of a disaster recovery plan is the major reason why most businesses can not be reopened after the loss of critical business records.

Today's high-tech reader-printers provide sharp, crisp plain paper copies just like your office copier. Zoom lenses allow the user to enlarge information for easy reading and printing.

Today's microfilm reader-printers can range from $ 3,000 for a compact desktop unit to over $30,000 for large engineering aperture card systems with zoom lenses, automatic card feeders and multiple print size options.

DIGITAL IMAGING

The ability to scan office documents and engineering drawings has caught the attention of many companies who simply want to "put everything" in the computer system. Continued