A Paperless Revolution

Those legacy reports on the mainframe

So what happens to those department reports that for as long as you remember, have been coming down from the mainframe and printing to your production site? You may want to take all of those acres of reports and start sending them electronically. Sounds great, but how do you do it?

Upon examination, you realize that no one in the organization has the knowledge of how to code those old legacy applications.  It would take a great deal of effort and money to find these people.  Then you have to bring them up to speed on your particular workflows and distribution methods. Finally, you have to put the new processes into production which results in delays and downtime during testing and implementing. Wouldn’t it be easier, more cost effective, and less disruptive if you could leave your existing processes in place and just modify the back end?

This is one of the great strengths of Barr EOM. Nothing need change up stream at the host and application level. Everything is handled downstream of the original workflow. No critical workflows are interrupted, the host processes remain unaffected, and implementation is simple and scalable.

Using our powerful business rules builder, administrators create criteria for routing and distributing documents using information contained within the original documents coming down from the host. By collecting information such as document source, headers, or even information extracted from within the document (account numbers, job tickets, document owner, etc.); Barr EOM can perform any number of processes. Perhaps you need large print jobs burst into smaller files (i.e. along account numbers); or maybe related information from several files needs to be extracted and bundled into a single useful document. Barr EOM can even use extracted data to build dynamic notifications letting users know that their information is ready for viewing online. And it doesn’t matter what format the original document is in, Barr EOM can receive those documents and convert them to today’s most popular web and email formats (PDFs, TIF, JPEG, etc.). Truly Barr EOM can make the move to Paperless quiet and sweet.

The Human Factor

Changing the psyche of the organization can be the biggest stumbling block to implementing an electronically distributed solution. Let’s face it, we are creatures of habit. We find comfort in doing our routine and sometimes we need a little help and persuasion to adopt to new methods. Take Susan in Accounts Receivable. Every morning she prints out the previous day’s reports just to determine who she needs to call about outstanding payments. With Barr EOM Susan could receive an email with a link online to those reports. The reports could be reorganized to separate out paid and unpaid so all she has to do is review on her computer screen the unpaid bills. Let’s take a look at Fred. He is the shipping manager. In this case Fred isn’t directly printing but is instead part of a process that has been going on forever. When an item is shipped, two copies of the shipping information are printed, one for the shipment and one for the records. Every week he sits down behind his desk with a stack of shipping reports. In this case, Barr EOM can use multiple destination rules to print the label while at the same time creating a PDF version of the information and routing it to an online repository for viewing later.

Now a look at Bill. Bill is "that guy" in the office that always wants to print everything. It can be a 28 page article or a 42 page report where only five pages are of interest to him. So what can you do to discourage this?  You don’t want to cut Bill off cold but you want to encourage him to start viewing things online. Barr EOM’s functionality is just what the doctor ordered.

Let’s take those 42 page reports for starters. Bill is only interested in those five pages scattered within the report. If Bill could view just the pages he is interested in, he would not feel the need to print the full report and discard the non-pertinent pages. Barr EOM is perfect for this. Extracting on key indexing within the document, a succinct report can be presented to Bill for viewing online. Now Bill is enjoying his cake.

Ok, we made Bill happy, now we need a little tough love. What about those long articles he is famous for printing then discarding. Well, Barr EOM can monitor Bill’s print and can do any number of levels of intervention.

• A light approach –       

1. Use Quotas to affect his behavior. Give Bill a set amount that he can print, say $10.00 per month. Barr EOM monitors his print activity and stops him when his balance is exhausted.  This will also encourage his use of less expensive devices as Barr EOMs accounting charges are device specific. The small B&W printer is $0.03 a page where the color MFP is $0.08 a page.
2. Behavior modification through Pop-up messages. If he is printing a large document then send him a message asking if he really wants to print it and let him know how much the job will cost to print to that device.

•  A heavier approach –

1. Instead of a passive approach use a pro-active one. When Bill prints a large file (over 10 pages) have Barr EOM automatically route the job for online viewing and send a notification to Bill that his job has been posted online for him to view.

Barr EOM can give you maximum flexibility to affect positive behavior and in so doing enjoy maximum benefits. Barr EOM truly can let your organization have its cake and eat it too.