When personal computers first appeared on the scene there was a big scare that they would make printed communication obsolete and drive paper manufacturers out of business.  The exact opposite occurred.  Low cost printers and computerized content creation made the use of paper soar.  And that was before the first computer crash caused all of us to back up all of our data in hard copy. We all got used to stacks of printed copy and paper shredding vans. The popular attention turned elsewhere.

The march of technology continued unabated in the background.  E-mails replaced paper faxes, Cloud backup replaced printed records. Twin screen workstations made computer input from scanned electronic documents possible. This has enabled a lean revolution.

As the march of lean enterprise propagates from the manufacturing floor to inside sales, scheduling and accounting departments, the business community is adopting paperless processes simply because they are easier. In the warehouse itself, new technologies such as tablets , RFID, bar code scanning, voice guided picking or pick to light systems will eliminate the tradition paper pick lists The management will discover that continuous smart phone access to the databases will make the human users even more productive than then original guided robots.

When my daughter was growing up, It was two months after she quit using a bottle that I realized that I no longer was washing bottles. Is paperless business a revolution that is occurring in plain sight without our conscious awareness? I can picture discovering two month accumulated dust on the fax machine or the tractor feed pick list printer.

Take a look around. Is LEAN helping you go paperless?

A perfect storm occurs when widespread adoption of lean paperless business processes occurs at the same time a newspapers and magazines are closing.  We may save the trees yet.