Moving Toward Paperless

Ross Kodner coined the term paperLESS - meaning that while it is utopian to eliminate paper entirely, significant steps can be taken that will make your office more efficient.
If you are just scanning a few documents a day, it really doesn’t matter. But if you want to scan every piece of paper that comes through the door – or anything close to it -- even small savings in time can add up to a major amount of time.

When you start scanning any significant volume of documents, the need for a full-fledged document management system such as Worldox, Interwoven’s Worksite or Hummingbird (Docs Open) becomes overwhelming. 

There are three logical steps when you scan a document: (1) scanning the document; (2) OCR’ing the document; and (3) saving the document to the DMS or elsewhere. For some documents you can omit step two (receipts, handwritten notes, etc.), but if you want the resulting document to be searchable, you need to OCR it, and this is the most processor-intensive and time-consuming piece of the equation. 

So to the extent that you can off-load parts of this process to a background or automated function, you can save significant amounts of time.

The configuration you wind up with will depend on your volume, the number of people scanning and the type of scanners you have. Most firms deploy a combination larger printer-scanners and small desktop units. The reason is simple: for large scanners there is a workflow issue – people have to get up from their desk, go to the scanner, scan, go back to the desk and save or manipulate the scanned document. This is efficient for large documents (where the overall speed counts) but inefficient for 1-2 page letters (where the setup is the bulk of the time).

For large volumes, you want to off-load the OCR process so that the user does not spend time doing it.  The major OCR programs, Abbyy and OmniPage, let you set up a “watch” directory and you can then schedule the OCR, even for off hours.

There are also a number of solutions which will integrate with your document management system, thereby eliminating another step.  If you use eCopy, modules are available that integrate with Worldox or other DMS’s. DocsCorp also offers a solution that lets you move scanned documents to the DMS efficiently. 

As with many solutions, this is not a “one size fits all” – you will have to tailor your solution to fit your specific needs and situation.

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