subject: Capturing Documents For Use With Document Management Solutions [print this page] Every organisation generates a huge number of electronic and paper documents. The files just keep piling up as the business grows. It also increases the time and effort required to maintain all this data and to manage it efficiently.
The process of managing business documents and data capture tasks starts with the conversion of paper documents into digital images. In digital form, documents and their content can be organised, archived, indexed and retrieved much more easily. When documents are scanned and converted electronically, a medium resolution digital copy is stored on a suitable archive device typically managed by a document management system.
In order to significantly improve business operations a document management system should be equipped to handle every kind of document. This can include not only paper documents but also video and audio files, electronic (Microsoft Office) documents, images, emails and faxes, all of which form an important part of an organisations daily business activities. There are three different ways of incorporating these files into a digital document management system.
These include:
Importing scanned images of paper files
Importing electronic documents such as Microsoft Office, emails, audio and video files.
Conversion facilities to change editable electronic documents into unalterable images in the case of electronic documents.
Document scanning creates an image of the document in order that it can be stored onto a computer. The physical document is taken to be scanned and transformed into a digital image and, along with the indexing data, is subsequently sent to the document management system.
Importing electronic documents refers to the process of incorporating all the different file types including graphics, video and audio clips, and Microsoft Office documents into the document management system. The files can be dragged and dropped into the system by the use of an embedded file viewer or directly from the originating application.
The process of document conversion refers to the process of converting copies of the electronic documents, such as spreadsheet documents or word processing documents, into non-editable images that are stored as part of the document management system. The images are converted and stored as Tagged Image File Format or TIFF. The conversion process also captures a clear stream of text taken directly from the document, removing the need for any OCR.
Organisations which need to process a huge number of files on a regular basis do so using batch processing techniques. When significantly large numbers of documents need to be incorporated into the system it becomes increasingly difficult to process one document at a time. The appropriate metadata can be used to index each document so that it can be retrieved later on. The truncation of paper documents eliminates the need for copying, physical storage and distribution costs and saves on printer ink and photocopy paper.
After each paper batch is captured, the system should enable users to classify them easily into separate documents prior to assigning indexing fields. In the case of high volume scanning operations, the use of bar codes to automatically separate and index documents saves both time and money. Organisations that need to process the same forms continuously may wish to use zone OCR techniques in order to reduce the time required for manual data entry.
Altogether, a well equipped document management system must enable all company records and files to be easily incorporated into the system. Organisations that have multiple offices spread across different parts of the country need a centralised system that can provide easy access to its documents, as and when necessary, to ensure proper document archiving.
