The ultimate promise of the last decade was the concept of the paperless office. With the proliferation of inexpensive high-speed copiers and printers, however, paper consumption—and associated costs—went through the roof.

PowerFlow Solutions had long been involved in addressing the needs of all business segments in digitizing and managing historical paper documents, of which there was an ever-increasing supply. We had the solution for capturing historical documents and were eager to understand how best to push the solution forward: to capture information now, before it became historical.

Our founders posed a mind-disturbing question: is a paperless office really possible? This was asked in the context of:

"It is sobering to reflect on the extent to which the structure of our business processes has been dictated by the limitations of the file folder."
                                                     - Michael Hammer and James Champy
                                                       Reengineering Your Business

Was the key to approaching a paperless office the simple, ubiquitous file folder? We thought so: time-tested, historically accepted, and understood by all.

Our determination, then, was to create a better file folder, a file folder that captures and manages and helps originate the content on paper without the paper.

Would it completely eliminate the use of paper?

No—there will likely be a paper trail of some sort. But, a better file folder will eliminate the need for paper copies, arguably the most expensive component of the paper food chain. And, a better file folder will remove or reduce the costs of storage, search and retrieval, equipment maintenance, and lost documents.

A better file folder will save our customers time and money while providing a recognizable competitive advantage. Customers happy with our better file folder will provide us prosperity.

We started with a clean sheet of paper (pun intended) and developed a fresh, innovative, simple solution utilizing the best-of-breed technology.

This is PowerFlow, the Better File Folder™. The promised potential of a paperless office is closer—this is what PowerFlow is about.