Document Scanning Blogs

2011

Many company departments have a specialist business system such as Accounts, HR and Customer Services  but they also use an enterprise wide electronic document management system to store the related paperwork.

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The Christmas period is a busy and hopefully lucrative time for online retailers. Unfortunately, however, for many customers, it is also a time of great disappointment when goods fail to arrive or the wrong items are delivered.

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In today’s litigious society, compliance is a hot topic. Every business has to ensure that its record keeping practices comply with a whole host of regulatory requirements.

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The concept of document capture or document scanning has been around for some time but the ability to capture the data from a document is a more recent development.

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Every employer has to keep information about his or her employees. These records must be processed and stored securely. Systems for storing HR records usually consist of an electronic database backed up by paper documents and this ‘system’ has to comply with the following requirements:

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In today’s litigious society the management of data has never been more important. Of particular concern is data relating to people, especially children and young adults and it should be managed in accordance with statutory requirements.

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Every business has an ever increasing amount of information and in a whole range of different formats. In addition to this each department has its own data sources, for example, Accounts will process financial paperwork whilst HR deal with employee records. In many cases, there may be ad hoc information management strategies within a company but no organisation wide standard framework which has to be adopted by all.

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The concept of becoming totally paper free is probably unrealistic but there are, however, some very effective ways of drastically reducing the amount of paper in any business.

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Over recent years business continuity has quickly evolved from simply being another term for disaster recovery into a well documented and regulated discipline in its own right. Of more importance, however, is its shift from being a reactive concept to a proactive and constantly developing business process.

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According to the Chartered Institute of Purchasing and Supply, contract lifecycle management ‘is the process of systematically and efficiently managing contract creation, execution and analysis for maximising operational and financial performance and minimising risk’

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It has recently been reported that the European Commission has 2,498 business systems, 163 of which are document management systems. There are, however, only 15 different business processes the systems are used for so why not just buy 15 systems?

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Records management is not a new concept and electronic management of paper records has been practiced for many years. The electronic management of electronic records, however, has only recently been recognised as an important issue.

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A recent survey has concluded that the fateful events of 9/11 had a fundamental impact on the way businesses now operate.

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There is no doubt that the thought an office fire is everybody’s nightmare but the reality is that it happens somewhere every single day of the week.

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A few years ago, The National Audit Office carried out a survey using a sample of 35 government organisations on how they were managing service contracts. They subsequently published two reports which concluded that better contract management by government departments could save between £160m and £290m per annum against an expenditure of £12bn.

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In April 2010 the Eyjafjallajökull volcano in Iceland erupted and threw many parts of the world into a state of chaos.

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Recent research has shown that European businesses spend around 362 million hours a year managing the processing of documents at a cost of £133 billion pounds. The study focussed mainly on documents which have an impact upon customer relations such as purchase orders, invoices and medical records. Many companies lose customers because of their inability to find documents.

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MoReq 2010 is the latest version of MoReq and it specifies the requirements for electronic records management systems within the European Union.

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For many organisations, the management of supplier contracts is very much a ‘hit and miss’ affair. Individuals in various departments can be responsible for the supply of a wide range of products and services each dealing with their own suppliers and there is no central control over processes or expenditure.

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Processing claims forms manually is time consuming and labour intensive. Delayed payments result in dissatisfied customers who will take their business elsewhere.

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Managing student records in paper format is not an easy task. Local authorities and the Records Management Society publish guidelines for good practice and cover issues such as:

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A recent survey carried out in the USA reports that many companies are now moving from paper based business processes to electronic systems. Scanned documents are replacing mountains of paper as organisations are looking to become more efficient and make cost savings.

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The digital pen is becoming increasingly popular with PCT’s (Primary Care Trusts) as a new means of collecting patient data.

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Every organisation should have a document retention policy in place. If documents are stored electronically, destruction dates can be automatically assigned to individual document types when they are scanned or saved into a document management system. Users can choose either to have the images deleted or assign a new date if a decision is made to extend the retention period.

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Many companies are unaware of the amount of important information they have and that it needs to be protected. There are many reasons why storing documents electronically is good business practice, for example, it is easier to find, it can’t be misfiled, filing cabinets are no longer required so more office space becomes available and of course savings are made as people are not spending time filing paperwork.

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OCR (Optical Character Recognition) software is used to extract text from a digital document. Some scanning software includes OCR so that a document is automatically processed with OCR as it is scanned. The software looks at every line of an image and tries to translate the black and white dots which make up the image into a letter or number.

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Scanned images can be stored in several different formats but the two most favoured are TIFF and PDF. The question of which is best is frequently asked and the answer is that it is a matter of a personal rather than a technological choice.

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Apart from the escalating cost of paper and toner cartridges there are many more reasons why companies should store their documents electronically. Here are a few examples:

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Paper forms are traditionally used when carrying out surveys and inspections or to record details about a person or a piece of equipment. When the forms have been completed the data then has to be keyed into a computer system for processing.

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A recent study has examined the dynamics of maintaining a paper based filing system and also analysed all the associated costs which many organisations will not be aware of. The reason for this is that the costs are mostly hidden and very rarely calculated but when they are, the results are quite astounding.

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Although the Information Commissioner’s Office has been in existence since 1984, it is only in recent years that its powers have really begun to impact on organisations when it comes to the handling and storage of personal data.

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Storing paper files in filing cabinets not only takes up valuable office space but also costs money in terms of the amount of time which is wasted trying to locate documents which have been misfiled or lost altogether.

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It has been proved time and time again that paper processing of accounts payable documents costs every organisation a substantial amount of money.

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When a company takes the decision to work more efficiently by installing an electronic document management system, there are several factors to consider which can ultimately affect the success of the project.

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Email has become a fully acceptable and most common means of business communication. The problem, however, is that businesses all too often fail to include email in their records management strategy.

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Almost 80% of all business transactions have a related contractual agreement and these documents can have a great impact on a company’s profitability.

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When discussing data capture solutions, the most common practices used to be manual data entry using a keyboard, scanning and optical character recognition or the use of barcodes.

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Converting paper documents into electronic files not only frees up valuable office space but also gives faster access to information which could be critical for any business transaction.

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An optical scanner is a device which converts text and illustrations into a digitized image. Paperwork can be scanned and stored electronically as soon as it enters an office building then distributed automatically to relevant personnel using workflow.

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The most common form of inputting data is by manually entering details using a keyboard. The data can be copied from any kind of document, for example, invoices or forms and the original can be both handwritten and typed.

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One definition of the term ‘data capture’ is ‘any process for converting information into a form that can be handled by a computer’. Essentially, it is the extraction of key data from a form, template or just a simple piece of paper which then has to be input into an I.T system.

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Many businesses have sensitive or valuable documentation which, for safekeeping, should be stored electronically. The problem, however, is that in house resource and/or expertise is not always available to carry out this work and the paperwork cannot be removed from the office premises to be scanned in a bureau.

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There are several companies which provide outsourced risk management and medical services for insurers and employers. The medical services include the assessment of applicants for personal insurance by carrying out medical examinations.

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In today’s litigious society, businesses are required to comply with a whole host of regulations and laws such as Sarbanes Oxley, Basel 11 and the Freedom of Information Act. The demands of this legislation make it increasingly important to have a strategy in place for managing documents and archiving material to an agreed set of standards.

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