Venturing into a paperless office.

• Author: Payne, Daniel H.

The Broken Hill Proprietary Company Limited ("BHP") is one of the world's largest diversified natural resources companies with a global portfolio of assets in the mining, steel, and energy industries. Headquartered in Australia, BHP has approximately 48,000 employees and more than US$12 billion in annual sales, and is considered a significant player in all of its businesses worldwide. BHP selected San Francisco as its headquarters to manage mineral operations outside Australia and more recently steel activities throughout Canada, the United States, and South America, as well as to assume various administrative functions. Within the San Francisco headquarters, the tax department oversees extensive research, planning, and compliance for a widespread assortment of companies and jurisdictions.

To enhance efficiency and productivity, BHP decided to eliminate some administrative functions previously performed on a centralized basis. A series of events was set in motion that led to a major restructuring of some corporate responsibilities. Decentralization brought with it a sudden sense of independence for those departments that remained. Every department had an opportunity to take broader managerial reins and to restructure itself. The tax department seized this opportunity to enhance productivity and efficiency by taking a major technological leap even though there was inherent risk-the paperless office project.

Definition and Purpose

The paperless office project affectionately referred to as "POP" by the tax department) is an undertaking that seeks to efficiently manage the document filing and retrieval process. Central to POP is the intent to reduce paper from the desks and files of all tax department personnel by storing almost everything in the computer system. This was achieved by integrating existing technology with state-of-the-art hardware and flexible software. The paperless system was designed to facilitate filing, faxing, researching, word processing, financial analysis, and document retrieval, as well as basic communication between department personnel and with the "outside world." All of this is completed efficiently from each individual's desktop and without paper.

Prior to POP, information was received and filed under a variety of inconsistent methods. Although individuals were confident and comfortable with their own personal filing systems, the complexity and inadequacy of this system (or non-system) raised a number of issues pertaining to document access for any project. These issues included, but were not limited to, the time required to find documents, documents being misplaced or misfiled, the lack of a formal process for storing documents, the absence of a central point of...