More businesses are looking for ways to reduce waste and adopt environmentally “green” practices, which benefits Milwaukee-based OnCourse Information Services. For nearly 40 years, the company has helped companies transition to a paperless or mostly paperless business environment.
And technological advances have made it easier for companies to shift to a paperless business environment.
“The short and long term cost savings of reducing a company’s paper waste are endless,” said Brian Sewart, president of OnCourse. “We can work with companies of all sizes and across all industries to find the best paperless solutions for them.”
OnCourse specializes in process improvement consulting, document scanning, data capture, data management, mailroom, reporting, and content management software solutions.
The company serves clients as large as Glendale-based Johnson Controls Inc., but also provides solutions for small business and manufacturing firms in the area.
Identifying company departments where there is typically a large amount of copying, filing and paper shifting is the first step to take when thinking about going paperless, Sewart said.
“Streamlining processes within certain departments can eliminate the need for making multiple copies of invoices, records and other documents to pass along to three or four people within the chain of command,” he said. “OnCourse can install solutions that scan those documents, which can then be routed electronically to anyone that needs to sign off on it.”
According to a U.S. Environmental Protection Agency study, office paper generation has increased 395 percent, almost 6.1 million tons since the 1960s.
OnCourse can implement self-sustaining internal solutions, but companies can also outsource the work to OnCourse employees, Sewart said.
“Our employees are professionally trained in document scanning and data management,” Sewart said. “We have set up an ultra secure environment in our facility that will give companies the piece of mind they need when allowing someone else to handle this type of data.”
OnCourse has secure rooms and servers and can directly handle a company’s post office box, electronically scan important documents, get rid of junk mail and automatically correlate the documents to the company’s existing databases, Sewart said.
“The electronic processes and document scanning eliminates the need to ship files and documents back and forth, but it also can increase employee productivity because they can now send something with the click of a button when before they’d have to hand deliver it to another department,” Sewart said.
Finding needed documents within traditional paper filing cabinets can also be difficult, Sewart said.
“A large majority of a company’s facility space is taken up by filing cabinets,” Sewart said. “Most of those documents are never retrieved, but employees often waste a large portion of the work day sifting through those files when they actually do need to find something.”
