DOCUMENT TRACKING
Still waiting for the paperless office? You're reamed. A recent study by the Boston Consulting Group predicts that the consumption of office paper will actually have doubled from 1996 to 2003.
A German software firm has come up with a paradoxically high tech solution to the decidedly low tech problem of organizing all that paper. Findentity, a system produced by Berlin-based Thax Software (www.thax.de/english/), lets office workers track and locate any letter, file, or photo in the office. It works like this: Every piece of paper to be tracked is "marked" with a transponder, a postage-stamp-sized sticker embedded with a chip that can store and send a 32-bit identification number. Users then install a local positioning net, a series of antennas strategically placed in doorways and underneath desks. When a file goes AWOL, the antennas home in on the missing document's transponder. The signal bounces back to a PC, where the software calls up a map of the office and points to the file with a flashing arrow. An optional ceiling-mounted laser beam can even spotlight the missing file. Businesses with multiple branches can track files by using Findentity in conjunction with the Net.
Thorsten Bartsch, 22, developed the tracking system after noticing how easily files got lost at his father's law firm. He started coding Findentity in Visual Basic, and eventually teamed up with his twin brother and father to form Thax Software. The company recently shipped its first commercial version of the paper tracker in Germany, and is eyeing the US market for expansion over the next year.
The system is best suited for places with mountains of paper to track - law firms and hospitals chief among them. The cheapest transponders cost the end user about $1.50, which adds up if your office has tens of thousands of files. "But that's nothing," counters Bartsch, "compared to the losses caused by chaos."
Bartsch hopes Findentity will become a standard plug-in for document software, and has already sent development kits to German legal software firms interested in integrating the system. A few of those kits, no doubt, are sitting on someone's desk, lost under a mound of paper.
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