If you've ever looked around your office and thought that it would be great to get rid of all of the paper, you can do that.
Better yet, you already have what you need to get started – a copy machine.
The scanning functionality of your copier can be used to convert paper documents into digital format (and use software to make them easy to find again too). Once your documents are digital, you can skip the filing cabinet and save them to a document management system or even a simple file share; email them; or even launch a business process like accounts payable.
A quick word about terminology: there's an entire category of software and hardware products dedicated to the process of converting paper to digital documents. Capture, document imaging, forms processing, and even document management are all used to describe this IT industry segment.
I'd also like to point out that the concept of capturing a document is simple. However, under-the-hood it's an extremely complex technology. As you need to scan large volumes of paper with speed, extract data from forms, convert to a full-text searchable document or just capture the image; capture becomes complicated.
Capturing documents has a proven ROI. Research from industry association AIIM reveals that most capture installations report ROI in fewer than 12 months, often in less than half a year.
As a reminder, here’s a quick list of benefits:
Ready to get started? Here are the steps you'll take to scan your documents.
Depending on your business objectives, you'll capture the image of the document and/or extract the relevant data from the document. Two types of capture software accomplish these tasks: document and data capture. These are two different technology processes.
Document capture converts a paper document into a digital replica of that document using PDF, JPEG, or TIFF file formats most often. The same software can also import and convert electronic files (Word, spreadsheets) as well.
Data capture (sometimes call forms processing) extracts data from a business form. Credit card applications are an easy example. When you reply, only the data on the form is captured and then placed into a database, an image of the form usually isn't kept unless there's a need to keep an image of your signature. An invoice is another example. Data capture software can be “trained” to look to certain areas of a form – the upper right for a customer reference number for example – and match invoice data to that customer, which will start a workflow for payment.
Once you decide what information you need to capture, you need to prepare the paper documents for scanning. As everyone knows, paper jams are no fun. Remove staples, paper clips, sticky notes (or tape them down so they can be scanned too); repair torn pages; and sort into batches (not always necessary depending on amount of scanning to do and the software you have).
Don't skip this step. If a paper clip or staple gets inside your copier or scanner, you might be shut down for a while as you try to fix it or have to call in a service tech.
Conversion is the software turning the analog document into digital format (or ingesting a born digital document so that it can be placed into a workflow).
Documents can be captured via:
Once captured, the documents will go through some or all of the following steps: document imaging, forms processing, image cleanup, quality control, and recognition.
If you need to keep a digital representation of the document, it can be saved as one of a number of formats: TIFF (Tagged Image File Format), JPEG, PDF, PDF/A, or GIF (Graphics Interchange Format).
For forms, the data and/or the entire form can be captured, depending on what your business needs. Data captured from a form can be moved into the correct database.
When documents are old or of poor quality, the quality of the documents can be improved with software or hardware image cleanup functionality. Common features include:
No software or data entry is perfect. In key-from-image operations, data can be validated by a second operator or via automated processes like database lookups. Poor quality images are flagged and scanned again.
Recognition software is the heart of capture. The software reads the data so that it can be indexed, for example.
If you don't index your documents, you'll never find them again! The index can be full text or key fields; though a combination of both is best. There are a number of ways to index.
Now that your documents are digital, they'll be easily accessible to anyone in your organization (if they have the right permissions, of course). Use them to automatically launch workflows, make customer service faster, or simply eliminate the need for filing cabinets. You can also dispose the paper documents according to your business records management policy.
If you're ready to remove paper from your business process, it's time for a document management consultation.