YOU'VE just finished reading 10 articles about insurance agencies going paperless, and you don't want to be left behind. You're ready to rush out, get some scanners, and hop on the paperless train. A more efficient office is your destination, but watch out for pitfalls that lie along the way. Checking your itinerary before you leave the station can prevent your journey to greater efficiency from being delayed or derailed.

Before you can implement an effective paperless system, everyone in the agency must already be consistently accessing all client and policy information from a single source that is periodically audited for accuracy. If that single source is a conventional paper filing system, and you're planning to simply scan all paper documents into a single workstation, you're really just moving an inefficient system from one place to another-you may even see a loss of efficiency because of the costs of the scanning effort. You're more likely to succeed if the agency is already using the agency management system as the single source of client information.

You must also ensure your agency management system contains complete detail for each of your clients. For example, if your electronic files for personal-auto clients don't have complete driver information, you will not be able to automatically merge the client file with an ACORD automobile loss notice. If your client files are incomplete, you lose efficiency every time you have to find information and fill in the gaps on the form. Depending on how your agency management system is configured, you may have to print out such forms, fill in the gaps manually, and scan the form to create a complete electronic document.

When going paperless, don't overlook the “people factor.” Every employee at the agency must be on board with the paperless effort; just one person not fully cooperating can sabotage the entire project. Address legitimate employee concerns at the start of the process so that the staff fully understands the benefits of going paperless.

Integrating scanners with an electronic filing system allows many documents to be electronically attached to a client file within the agency management system. Take care to avoid pitfalls associated with the structure of your electronic filing system. If too many unnecessary items are attached to a client file, it may become too cumbersome to manage. If your filing hierarchy attaches documents to a particular version of a policy, the system may archive those documents, along with that version of the policy, when you enter a new policy in the file. Thus you may attach an accident-prevention course certificate to a file that has received an updated policy, but later be unable to find the certificate because it was archived with the original policy. Our agency uses a T-filing system to make electronic documents easier to locate, and dual monitors let us view an overall file and a document within that file at the same time.

Hardware is another factor in the efficiency of a paperless system. Older PCs and low-end scanners may take so long to scan and convert paper documents into electronic form that agency employees lose faith in the paperless effort. It may be worth the investment to have at least one centrally located, high-speed scanner, as well as up-to-date computers.

Information security and data back-up are important issues to any agency and take on new significance when all of an agency's information is in electronic form. The ability to produce a complete and accurate policy transaction record is especially important to an agency in the event of an E&O claim.

Going paperless can be a wonderful experience. After three years, we never look back and wish we were still paper-based. Addressing the right issues and avoiding potential pitfalls will ensure you have a paperless success and not a paperless failure.

(Editor's note: In his October column on dual monitors, Ed mentioned a Web site, www.realtimesoft.com. Because of a line break, it appeared that a hyphen should be inserted between “realtime” and “soft,” which is not the case. We regret any confusion.)