Reduce Clutter With An Organized Electronic Filing System
In their pursuit of efficient retrieval of in-house information many firms have considered using a document scanning service
. Usually this service is needed for large scale operationscompanies that have lots of paper and a business-critical need to retrieve important information quickly and accurately. On the other hand, a smaller, but paper intensive operation may benefit from converting paper to electronic files as well. An analysis of the retrieval needs and a cost/benefit analysis will enable the operations manager to make a good decision about contracting for scanning services.
Do We Need This?
The myth of a paperless office has been around since the 80s. Yes, many companies have come a long way, and some have greatly reduced the blizzard of paper on desks and in file cabinets. But those same firms often receive paper from such groups as customers, attorneys, accountants, and project operations personnel.
The first step in determining if you need to digitize your paper is to inventory what paper is on hand, and how it is used. It may be best to allow a scanning system vendor help you determine the benefits of decreasing the time your employees use to locate critical information. If staff could focus only on their job, will document management expenses be reduced and profitability increased? Or is the expense of the service more than the labor-intensive paper document management system you use currently?
Dont forget to consider any regulatory requirements in your plans. These requirements may be the most important element in the choice of a solution.
What Kind of Access to the Scanned Information Do We Need?
A mass conversion of thousands of documents is very different from scanning several hundred memos. Some firms decide to scan and index only mission critical documents, and consequently develop an in-house scheme for other paperwork. If you plan to use a service for just a portion of your documents, make sure to talk to your vendor about scalability if, and when, you decide to do more at a later date.
Another critical question is the need to retrieve important information across platforms, as is the need to convert to a new platform as it evolves.
Records management needs must be considered as well. If you already have a records procedure you should be able to tell prospective vendors how and when certain files must be discarded. They in turn must prove to you that the electronic files will really be erased. And you must have a permanent record of the deletion.
After determining how many and what kind of documents will be scanned, you must decide how the electronic versions will be indexed and used. A good scanning service will have suggestions based on their experience with other firms like yours. What level of text search is required for your operation? For example, do you need Boolean search capabilities, or maybe Fuzzy logic methods?
Scanning technology has advanced considerably in recent years. Most firms do not choose to simply scan to a graphic file or a PDF. (PDFs created by a digital graphic scan cannot be searched, so an index could only be produced by hand.) Choosing to use an optical character reading (OCR) technology means that the results are text files that can be searched and indexed using the same technology that allows for search in any text file. Finding a vendor with good indexing procures and database maintenance is the most important element in starting a document scanning program. Systems to manage internal information are now converting to Content Management Systems, Enterprise Content Management, etc. For this level of sophistication, it may be prudent to start with an expert on these applications.
Can Your Paperwork be Scanned and Stored Offsite?
If you have lots of paper and you have low security requirements, you can find a vendor who will collect and prepare your documents, scan them with OCR, index them, and then store them on an offsite server, or in the cloud, that your employees can access. This is especially helpful for firms with multiple offices, since the documents can be retrieved quickly from almost anywhere.
What to Look for in a Document Scanning Service
Since removing staples and sticky notes, then running sheets of paper through a scanner is a fairly simple procedure, the process element that is most important is the coding and indexing of text. This is the service that will prove invaluable to your staff. Since it is hard to get everyone to file paper or electric documents in a uniform manner, the best thing is to have software to do it for you. (Think how well Google works. When the internet was first born, there were search engines that actually hired librarians to index all the web sites they could find. That of course was an exercise in futility. Even the best indexer cannot look at everything in the bottomless well of web sites.)
If the indexing is done well, all of your content will be available at any time, to anyone, at any place. The advantage of that is invaluable to many businesses.
Document scanning is a technology that has found a place in almost every business.
We all have just too much paper, even when we mean to be paperless. Since all of these records must be indexed in some meaningful and useful way, the prudent method is to use the technology to your advantage. Document scanning and document storage not only saves space, but also manpower to index and retrieval all of that corporate knowledge that you know existsif you can just find it
by:Beant Bajwa
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