Corporate Paperless Initiatives: A Paperless Office Case for a Members Club in SG

My first experience in projects involving the implementation of paperless office is that of a private members club in Singapore. This was my first external engagement as project manager of 1-Net Singapore Pte Ltd. It took almost one month to complete the entire study between the period from August and September 2006.

For the stakeholders of the club, the main goal is to do away with the voluminous paper-based forms that piles up every year, archived and retained in the storage for at least seven (7) years and occupies huge storage space.

Their objectives in going paperless consisted of: (a) streamlining the process of form submission for the key processes identified, eliminating waste in the form of non-value adding activities, minimizing non-value adding paper handling cost, reducing cycle time, and eliminating redundant activities; and (2) reduce the amount of paper-based forms generated by various processes minimizing costly office space specially so when the cost of office space in Singapore is not cheap.

The study is completed in one month and there were two significant results: (1) we were able to surface all those processes and procedures both documented and undocumented. Undocumented processes are tacit knowledge that employees may have kept in their minds and sometimes employees (not particular to the organization) tend to have limited understanding of their process; and (2) a business requirements statement that spells the business justification for going paperless e.i. the minimum and maximum investment cost that the company may choose to incur in going paperless, the benefits in terms of cost savings and return on investments.

Some of the members of the management committee raised valid concerns in going paperless. The first of these concerns is the practicality of implementing it across all processes, e.g. (a) Do we need to use online form submission just to request for a purchase of 1 rim of A-4 size computer paper when its value is only SGD6.00? (b) Supporting documents, such as passport, which comes along with the membership application form, is it legally acceptable to submit it in electronic image format? (c) Other issues such as what will happen if the business becomes heavily dependent on computerized system, what if one day the system just bogs down, how do we go back to manual process?, and (d) the cost of maintaining the application over a period of 5 to 6 years before it reaches its zero book value and its requirement for upgrade.

For this purpose, I reserve my own personal comments to the above questions and leave it to the succeeding discussions. Meanwhile, the result of my presentation to the board was very successful. Most of the committee members agreed to embrace paperless and accepted the process study outcome. The next step for them was to look for vendors on workflow system with document management capability and development work integrating the workflow solution with their existing portal and finance applications. They will use the BRS document as requirements specification for their vendors. As of this writing, the club already engaged the services of one the software services company in Singapore for the next phase of the project and that is the implementation of the paperless office according to the specifications that the team prepared in phase I.

For our part, the scope of our work is limited to the process study. Thanks to my green belt Six Sigma training from 1-Net, I used the DMAIC methodology as framework in facilitating the understanding of their ‘as-is’ processes, mapping the ‘to-be’ processes and prepared the cost-benefit analysis which is basically the business justification in going paperless.