adi Telecom are the IT, Telecoms and Systems Integration division of the adi Group. Though we probably all believe that in the future robots will do all the work, energy will be green and abundant and all we will have to worry about is how we spend all our free time? that could well be true, but the more difficult question is question is how will we get there?.
adi Telecom has been working with a range of customers who are starting to take some early steps to move towards the future, these baby steps include:
The Paperless Office
For the past three decades, technologists have talked of the imminent arrival of the paperless office, but even after many significant technology advances, were not much closer to it than we were when we first stated to use e-mail in earnest in the early 90s and the reality is :-
Each day, one billion photocopies are made (Source: Forrester Research)
The annual growth rate for the amount of paper produced by the average company is 25%.
(Source: Gartner)
There are over four trillion paper documents in the US alone, and this number is growing at a rate of 22%, or roughly 880 billion paper documents a year. (Source: Coopers and Lybrand)
So no matter what we think, say or want, paper looks like it will be here for here for some time.
adi Telecom is working with a large national FTSE 250 construction business to move their internal processes to a paperless operations. We have started with site staff and their mandatory Health and Safety reporting, now they complete an electronic form on their smartphone or tablet (rather than a paper form, which had to be transcribed to a spreadsheet once they are back at the office).
Since the electronic form has intrinsic data validation and many options are on pull down menus; the data capture is simpler, more flexible, more rigorous and less error prone than the paper system and the data is uploaded automatically over the mobile or Wi-Fi network. The electronic form also allows embedded photographs (taken with the phone/tablet cameras) which can be annotated on site with comments and diagrams as well as providing a GPS lone worker safety alert system.
All the data is collated centrally and an automated compliance server runs analytics on the data to produce pie charts, histograms, trend analysis and a range of other reports for all sites. This statistical and graphical output can be displayed in near real time on large display screens at each site office. All the data can be rolled up to provide business wide statistics and performance metrics for Health and Safety.
Having proved many of the basic principles with the Health and Safety activities, the next step was to move some of the HR process to paperless operation, starting with the holiday request form. This electronic form would be available to all staff on their smartphones/tablets or their work PCs (desktop or laptop).
The form was electronic but this process had a more complex workflow requiring a sign-off approval, through a formal DocuSign step and once completed by the line manager, the approved holiday was recorded in the individuals Outlook calendar and with notification e-mails to all parties. The system also provided e-mail reminders to the individuals in the process to ensure that all the steps were completed in a timely manner.
By delivering a simple electronic forms solution which will allow the client to be self-sufficient in quickly building their own business forms for all their departments coupled with configurable business logic/workflow, electronic DocuSign and integration with their X500 directory/Outlook e-mail and calendar system adi Telecom have developed a highly flexible paperless office solution which the client can roll-out across all their employees for all their departments.
For more information on adi Telecoms paperless office solution please contact
V.Brashko adi Telecom
[email protected]