Going Paperless At Work - Milk in Africa

Going Paperless At Work – Milk in Africa

Powdered MilkOne of the best things about DocumentSnap is getting to hear how readers and customers go paperless at work and at home. Everyone has a different story, paperless workflow, and business.

Today I’m starting a new series called Going Paperless At Work where I ask the DocumentSnap community about the challenges and solutions they face. First up is Marcel from Milfora Dairy Supplies. I love this story because it is a unique business with unique challenges. If they can go paperless with their geographic and logistical challenges, anyone can.

Take it away, Marcel.

Tell us a little bit about your business. What do you do?

We supply the Southern part of Africa with industrial bulk dairy products that we source mainly in Oceania (Australia, New Zealand), E.U., Argentina, and North America as well as in the Southern African region itself.

Are the people you communicate in the same office, or distributed?

I run the show from here in Huntsville but have joint venture partners and associates across South Africa, Zimbabwe, Zambia and Malawi. I do all of the procurement here, whilst partners take care of the on the ground work in Africa, mainly the selling and logistical back-up.

What are some of the challenges you have faced sharing documents all over the world?

We tried to work with Google Docs first, then Box.net and eventually settled on Dropbox. Latter seems to give us the least hassles. Bandwidth in Africa is often an issue, then power cuts/interruptions. Some other issues are internal problems we created for ourselves, not fully comprehending some of the finer details on how to run these file sharing facilities – things like multiple user email addresses and then not remembering anymore with which email to access what Dropbox account. Dropbox also has nasty habit of not recognizing certain punctuations in folder/file titles.

Then the African contingent all runs on Microsoft machines and software, I am purely Apple up here. Often causes consternation, sometimes amusement.

What has worked for you to overcome these as much as possible?

Making up our mind which system to use across all of our operation, then stick with it and get good at how to get as much out of it as possible. At one point we also tried Google Drive, had some of our data sitting with Google, some with Dropbox. Not the way to go.

Also forgetting about the freebies and low cost systems, invest a bit of money and have the proper fully blown business end versions of the spectrum offered by the software companies.

Do you use a mobile device to capture documents at all?

Rarely. Just normal office scanners where we capture documents ourselves. Most of the documents are electronic already, so archiving, sharing and distributing is a breeze when it is all set up properly.

Any final tips or suggestions for someone looking to go paperless?

Absolute must in our business. Our contract folders contain rather complicated shipping documentation, a lot of them and often also quite poor graphics quality (typical of African service providers like road haulers, shipping lines, container terminal operators and the likes). Average dossier would contain 15–20 of such documents, and editing and emailing backwards and forwards would be a nightmare.

Decent folder/file structures are imperative, as is a file naming protocol when you have numerous folks dumping stuff in Dropbox.

Awesome, thank you so much Marcel. If you’d like to share your business’s paperless workflow, please get in touch.

About the Author

Brooks Duncan helps individuals and small businesses go paperless. He's been an accountant, a software developer, a manager in a very large corporation, and has run DocumentSnap since 2008. You can find Brooks on Twitter at @documentsnap or @brooksduncan. Thanks for stopping by.

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