Document Imaging in Business Part 1: Documents vs. Images

Document Imaging in Business Part 1: Documents vs

. Images

Until recently, the term 'paperless office' was a joke among office engineers, but today it's become a reality with a little help from the imaging and document-management industries. By switching to this paperless process, your company can enjoy all of the benefits of the Information Age fewer input errors, reduced paper costs, better distribution of and access to information, and superior auditing abilities. Let's look at the switch, starting with some basic definitions: documents and images.

Documents A document is, at essence, anything created by your business for the purpose of storing information for later retrieval or transferring information from one place to another. Virtually every piece of paper your business uses are documents, including many things that aren't on paper. This includes "digital paper" such as e-mails, and digitally-stored faxes. Invoices, checks, receipts, purchase orders, memos, employee records, and many other items qualify. Documents are generally divided into 'input documents', which show a transaction taking place (like an order form or a receipt), and 'output documents' which show the state of the system without changing any elements in it (like a financial statement). Some documents are output documents from one subsystem and input documents in another, such as an inventory statement that reports an unacceptably low level of a particular good being used to generate an order for that good.

Images An image is a digital object of a graphical nature that is stored electronically. Photographs, charts, maps, and diagrams are all images. One distinct caveat, however, is that images are static; a video clip, audio clip, or slideshow is not an image (though a slideshow is generally made up of images, and a single frame from a video clip can be treated as an image.) One essential purpose of a paperless office is to use electronic devices to turn documents into images and store them in a way that makes them easy to retrieve when they're needed. The goal is to identify the first possible stage in an input document's lifecycle in which it can become an image, and make the conversion efficiently as a normal part of workflow. On the other end, output documents are created and distributed electronically, making the transition into 'hard copy' only when it is absolutely necessary. This way, document imaging can create a paperless or nearly paperless office.

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