By Stan Rosenzweig

On my recent visit to inspect the back office of a rapidly growing service business in Florida, the local manger was proud as a new dad, as he showed us how all incoming mail is opened, scanned and distributed through his local network. He eliminated the mailroom, file room, inboxes, outboxes and a whole lot of clerical people. He improved profits by cutting costs and everyone loved the system (except the former file clerks).

He had joined the trend that is routine for insurance companies and other service businesses, scanning all incoming mail into PDF format documents, making those documents:

• immediately accessible to all employees who need them,

• efficiently on-line, real-time, and
• stored in 1/1000^th the space needed for paper.

He eliminated the need to lease a lot of extra office space for file cabinets, not to mention not missing those people who file "Continental Airlines" under "A" (or some other letter where you can never find it again).

Here's where the synergy gets even better. Once you keep all your files on your network instead of on paper, you don't need duplicates in cabinets in individual offices. This reduces each office from an individualized work space to just a place to sit and work.

For outside sales people and other road warriors who are away 80% of the time anyway, one desk is as good as another, so you no longer need to pay rent for their assigned, but often unoccupied, desk space. Road warriors don't need permanent offices. All they really need are:

• their trusty laptop,
• a broadband connection and
• their personal phone number and voicemail that travels with them.

When road warriors plan to be in the office for a few hours, or days, they simply reserve a desk the way they reserve the office conference room, or a hotel room. Sharing desk space is called "hoteling" and has gained national acceptance by major corporations to the consternation of the commercial real estate business, who must come to terms with more modest needs due to this smarter space planning paradigm.

The trend is toward using document imaging for instant file access and phone traveling technology to let phone numbers and voicemail follow you when you are on the go. Both have become cheap enough for most businesses. Together, they make hoteling with telecommuting the viable option that can save you a lot of payroll and rent.

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Stan Rosenzweig, president of Office Technology Consulting Inc., Stamford, CT, can be reached through a web form at www.phoneguru.com, or at (203)323-6070, ext. 82409.