City of Langford digital document workflow saves office space
By: Kathleen Lau - ComputerWorld Canada (24 Aug 2009)
The City of Langford's move to a digital document workflow saved it 1,500 square feet of office space. Why document printing is not considered "sexy" and why IT managers overlook the opportunity to optimize the way they print, copy and scan paper
The City of Langford in British Columbia was fast running out of physical storage space for paper files so it introduced a digital workflow to better handle the influx of documents, like development and building permit applications, from the expanding city.
But before starting this transition in 2003, the City had a very manual and paper-based approach that, according to Mike Palmer, the City of Langford IT manager, “used to be walk to file room and retrieve a paper file and take it back to your desk.”
Scanning all incoming documents resolved the physical space issue but using network scanners to do the job was proving too much a burden on the devices, recalls Palmer.
“Because we were growing so quickly as a city, we had so much paper coming in and that was overwhelming our input capabilities,” he said.
Coincidentally, some copier leases were approaching time for renewal and some printers needed replacing. “We had a whole bunch of things coming that really forced me to step back and take a look at the whole picture,” said Palmer.
A scrutiny of that bigger picture led to the decision to replace the montage of single function devices like printers, copiers, scanners and faxes with multifunctional machines, said Palmer.
The situation at the City of Langford is a common scenario across many organizations where they had “a printer next to a copier next to a fax machine,” said Jean-Paul Desmarais, senior marketing manager for business printing with Hewlett-Packard Canada Co..
Actually, in the past several years, there has been an awareness among IT managers of the availability of multifunction machines, said Desmarais. But printing is often something that gets overlooked because it’s not a part of the IT budget that garners much attention, he said.
“It’s not a sexy issue like server virtualization or a high visibility area like security that keeps people up late at night,” said Desmarais.
IT managers often just trust that their printers work and don’t necessarily look to optimize what the equipment can do, said Desmarais. In fact, the average industry spend on printing and print-related processes like document handling, storage and processing is six per cent of the income, he said.
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