Despite heavy investment in electronic workflows over the last few decades, most businesses still generate paper on a regular basis.
Contracts, memos, estimates, and invoices are printed, signed, copied, and stored for record keeping. Unfortunately, this creates a need for space dedicated to filing and reduces the ability access to critical data.
Maintaining regulatory compliance, meeting and keeping up with retention schedules, and sharing information becomes increasingly difficult as volumes of paper continue to build up. One of the most cost-effective and resource-saving solutions is to image these documents which enable instant access and sharing capabilities.
Document imaging removes the dependence on paper and mitigates the risk of loss or misfiling, allowing businesses to run more efficiently by implementing best practices.
How is Document Imaging Different from Document Scanning?
In a practical sense, there is no difference between document imaging, document scanning, or document conversion. The same goes for document digitization.
Different users in particular industries will use these terms interchangeably. While there are some technical differences, document imaging, at its core, involves scanning paper and microfilm and taking an image of the source to produce an electronic file which can be searched, edited, shared, and archived.
How Can Document Imaging Benefit My Business?
Using the services of a proven, trusted document imaging provider can save countless hours of looking for paper, cut down on the space necessary to store physical documents, and enable secure file sharing across multiple offices and departments.
Document imaging does not reduce the amount of paper coming into the business, but it can reduce the amount of paper stored on-site. Once a company switches to digital documentation, employees print less, since filing is digital. This process offers considerable benefits to businesses that leverage it successfully.
4 Benefits of Document Imaging
1. Smoother Workflow
Paper documents are susceptible to loss, damage, and misfiling. Working with digitized files from a document imaging project enables seamless access to multiple users.
Whether these documents are stored on a server or in a cloud-based document management system, getting information to the right people at the right time is much quicker with digital documents.
2. Improved Processes
Some document and content management systems allow users to set reminders and notify specific employees when a document is ready for signature, approval, or deletion.
Most work processes flow through several employees before completion. Document imaging can help automate the process, reducing wait times.
3. Better Access to Data
With optical character recognition (OCR) and other data capture techniques available today, users can not only view and modify an image of their document, they can also search the full text of the document. This minimizes manual data entry and allows information to flow more efficiently.
Onboarding paperwork for a new employee may be completed in minutes, rather than hours. Also, any employee that needs a particular piece of information can find it, without digging through archives and file folders which oftentimes are at a different location.
4. Reduced Costs
In-house printers come with expenses like toner, maintenance, and paper, but sending projects out for printing costs even more.
By switching to digital documents, businesses save money on all of the costs associated with printing. Some printing will still be necessary, but any reduction represents direct savings.
Interested in a Document Imaging Project?
Document imaging is one of the many steps on the road to automation in the workplace.
With improved productivity and a reduced number of man-hours needed to perform essential business functions, the question facing today’s businesses is not if – but when – to start a document imaging project.
ILM Corp has been providing the federal government and organizations of all sizes with flexible, customized document imaging services for the last four decades.
If you are interested in getting started on a document imaging project of your own, contact us today at 540-898-1406.
