subject: Using Document Scanning Services To Improve Product And Service Quality [print this page] Businesses have to constantly meet the challenges presented to them by the fluctuating economy and face situations that they may have not come across before. Though it is necessary to exercise control over operating expenses, it is equally necessary to find out the extent to which you can reduce investments in non-core business activities without affecting the quality of your products and services. One area that should be constantly reviewed is any process involved in managing your business and customer information, including your document scanning facilities.
Many companies offer professional document scanning services and this makes room for both commercial businesses and government agencies to achieve substantial cost savings. The efficiency gains made will start to contribute to the cash flow of the business. If the current economic crisis has compelled the organisation to stall its investment in document scanning operations, then it is necessary to try and rethink your scanning strategies on the following grounds:
Document Scanning Greatly Reduces Cost of Paper Consumption: Paper expenses stretch far beyond the regular toner and photocopy bills. The expenses also include the cost of labour to distribute and store documents and office filing space to ensure each document is properly maintained. Shipping costs are also an additional expense. Document scanning services can help by initiating the process of digitising your paper documents and thus considerably reduce the internal expenses involved. By outsourcing the storage of your scanned documents by archiving them on a hosted server, you can also be relieved of many of the expenses involved in managing your documents. Factors such as document volumes, indexing requirements, speed of access, number of users and the lifecycle characteristics of your documents will be the key factors in determining how much you can cut your costs and increase your ROI through the effective use of document scanning and archiving services.
Document Scanning also prevents the Time Wasted in Searching for the Paper Documents and Money Filing: Electronic document images are comparatively easier to locate and store than images in paper format. With the help of professional document management services, you can easily index your electronic document images to provide fast user retrieval of all relevant documents.
Scanning helps to automate the Business Processes: Following the implementation of a document management service or a back file document scanning project, companies can also choose to opt for additional software services, such as data capture, in order to increase the ROI. By introducing automated recognition services as part of the document scanning process, you can cut down on the labour costs and errors that result from undertaking manual data entry tasks.
Document Scanning Helps to Check Regulatory Compliance: Document management and document scanning services help the organisation to comply with the stringent requirements when it comes to regulatory record-keeping and retrieving documents for compliancy purposes.
Despite the fact that the ROI for document scanning solutions are well documented and real, organisations may still be hesitant about making an upfront investment in that technology. However, you need not be dissuaded from investing in document scanning services. You can reduce your capital expenditures by opting for service based solutions or outsourcing the task of scanning, indexing and storing your records.
