Tailored to Your Image
Paperless Environments LLC
Baton Rouge, La.
www.paperlessenvironments.com
Imaging, the way your company operates. That is the promise made by Paperless Environments, www.paperlessenvironments.com, Baton Rouge, La., with its line of full-service content management technology that includes imaging software, document management and routing applications, onsite and Web training, consulting services, and system support.
Document imaging is one of the fastest growing segments of technology in construction, as companies see the benefits of replacing paper documents with digitally managed content. Replacing the need to manually mail or fax copies of invoices or purchase orders, for example, to the multiple interested parties on a job, these systems allow companies to scan documents into the system to be stored, indexed, and shared.
While many accounting software providers have developed content imaging and management add-on applications, many contractors are finding great value using standalone solutions that integrate into their enterprise systems. This market niche has a few prominent providers, and Paperless Environments is one company that is becoming hard to ignore. In roughly three years the company has added 100 clients to its customer portfolio and has increased revenue in each of those years.
The company was born roughly eight years ago when company president Seth Dawson, who at the time was chief financial officer for a large construction firm, could not find an off-the-shelf solution to meet his company’s imaging needs.
After he and his partner developed and fine tuned a custom imaging system for four years, they decided it was time to share the technology with the rest of the industry and formed Paperless Environments.
Its flagship product pVault allows every document generated or received during business workflow to be deposited and indexed for easy access and retrieval. Documents can be indexed and stored by defining custom document types and indexes. Fields can be updated using Zone OCR (optical character recognition) or though a unique capability called ICR (intelligent character recognition). ICR, also known as handwriting recognition, captures handwritten information on documents—ideal for managing such things as timesheets and inventory control sheets. This allows superintendents to continue using paper sheets out in the field, and accurately capture the data once it is sent into the office.
Its pBridge product allows users to automatically attach imaged documents to accounting or database records, pull index data directly from these systems for validation, directly update or create import batch files from OCR/ICR imaged data, create combined data with image reports using Crystal Reports, and integrate imaged documents with existing data.
Its APFlow system is a critical component to how content flows throughout the application. APFlow allows all data to be entered and managed within the system throughout the approval cycle. Using the system, once an invoice and its related paperwork is captured, accounts payable personnel can view every outstanding invoice within the company. Invoices are automatically matched up to related receiving tickets, purchase orders, and other documents and then routed to the appropriate person for approval. During the review process, personnel can view budget/commitment information, job numbers, cost codes, and other related information directly from the accounting system. They are then able to code invoices where they want the cost to post and APFlow validates and completes the transaction.
The one caveat of imaging technology is the need for the system to be tightly integrated to a company’s accounting system. With the ability to integrate with 11 leading construction accounting systems and query into almost any other database program, Paperless Environments is dedicated to facilitating this integration.
In the case of one recent customer win, Paperless Environments even went the extra mile and reworked its frontend in order to integrate data with an accounting system it had not worked with previously.
The Ruhlin Co., www.ruhlin.com, Sharon Center, Ohio, had decided to switch its imaging technology to Paperless Environments even though its existing accounting software did not directly integrate with the application. Ruhlin’s accounting vendor was working to develop its own set of APIs (application programming interfaces) in order to integrate with Paperless and other imaging vendors. However, those plans were abandoned once the accounting vendor was acquired. Still that did not stop Paperless Environments from holding up its end of the bargain.
“Paperless basically rewrote their frontend in order to import the documents into accounting for us,” says Grant Snider, director of IT (information technology), Ruhlin. “You fill out some indexes and it gets routed around. When it is approved all the info is then added and it is imported into a table in accounting. You have to start a process that opens a batch in a particular table. Paperless then puts the information into that table and the accounting system takes it and distributes it to the rest of their tables like they would normally.”
Snider says the company implemented Paperless Environments in August 2007 and thus far he has heard positive feedback from the 50 users on the system. He says working off one database saves time because there is no invalid data, and the fact the application is written in .NET makes it very stable.
“When you have a document and you are trying to assign a cost code and a job number to it, you select a job number and it brings up a list of available cost codes for that job,” says Snider. “So it actually reads the database from (accounting) and gives you a list of options. This makes it so that you don’t assign a non-valid number. That is a read-only situation. I like that aspect the most—you have one database for those indexes and everyone reads off of that one database.
“Paperless has its own database for keeping track of document numbers, auditing, and such, but you can’t assign indexes to a document that does not exist in the accounting database.”
Seth Dawson, president, Paperless Environments, says once companies get accustomed to using the technology they look for other ways to use the system.
“The big thing right now is the ability to index and store email,” says Dawson. “Companies get tons and tons of emails in correspondence with partners on the job, and whereas before they would print them out and store it all as paper, they want a way to store and index emails electronically so that they never lose them.”
The company recently rolled out an add-on module to its core application that integrates with Microsoft Outlook. It simply adds a new button in a user’s Outlook that allows them to index emails and attachments into the system.
As imaging evolves, subs will need to play a big role in reducing the amount of paper. Therefore, the company is currently developing sub portals that allow trade partners to submit documents online as well as track where payments are in the pay cycle. It is an idea that came from one of Paperless’ first customers.
“Our product is ours from the ground up, so when customers come to us with suggestions we can respond instantly,” says Dawson. “This is also due to the fact we come at imaging from the construction end-user perspective, meaning our technology works the way a construction firm expects it to work.”