Carrie Bradley, owner of Perth-based business Paperphase, says she is on a one-woman crusade to make the corporate world paperless.
Carrie Bradley, owner of Perth-based business Paperphase, says she is on a one-woman crusade to make the corporate world paperless.
And with global mining companies and some of the major banks looking to make parts of their business paperless, the concept is slowly becoming a reality.
Emigrating from the UK in 2000 and starting her consultancy business late last year, Ms Bradley says she can provide companies of all sizes with a tailored, step-by-step guide on going paperless.
Ms Bradley refers to it as paper-lite, rather than paperless, with the end goal of reducing paper consumption by about 75 per cent.
A lot of the process involves streamlining business’s online activities, creating an intranet for internal communication, and greater utilisation of online forms and email.
The concept then flows through to record-keeping and archives, with records scanned and stored on file, making cumbersome filing cabinets a thing of the past.
Ms Bradley said the best way for organisations to go paperless was to take small steps, by making one aspect of the business paperless before moving to other parts of the business.
She believes its all about changing ingrained habits.
“It’s not a big scary, disruptive thing, it’s done so gradually that before long it’s hard to remember what it was like before you switched over,” Ms Bradley told WA Business News.
“There’s a perception that it’s a big deal, and it doesn’t need to be.” A practising lawyer in the UK, Ms Bradley said the concept of the paperless office was more mainstream in the US and UK than in Australia, with a number of accountancy practices, law firms, real estate agents, banks and financial planning firms making the transition overseas.
She said she was on a mission to educate the Australian corporate world on how to cut its paper use, and dispel some of the common misconceptions about paperless offices.
“The biggest myth is that it’s expensive, which it is not,” she said.
“Another myth is that there’s no such thing...but you can do it to whatever level suits you.
You don’t have to do absolutely everything, there are a lot of options.” Going paperless has many benefits, Ms Bradley said.
As well as the substantial reduction in stationary costs, organisations can also save money by not having to store files in warehouses offsite.
And with the trend towards organisations minimising their carbon footprint, going paperless can brand the organisation to current and potential clients and customers as environmentally aware.
“It also impresses clients, to think you’re a forward thinking, progressive company,” Ms Bradley said.
Having records stored electronically also makes the retrieving of archived information quicker and easier.
Ms Bradley said documents could be scanned and automatically indexed using a process called optical character recognition, which read the page, picked up the words and indexed information.
“Our whole philosophy is to phase paper out of business.
A lot of businesses do it for one area, see how successful it is and want to do for other parts of the business,” Ms Bradley said.
