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Benefits Of Imaging

If you threw open the windows in your office on a windy day, what would happen? If your business is like so many others, there'd be chaos as paper flew everywhere. Even employees who use computers for most work would have trouble getting anything done as important records fluttered away. Perhaps it's time for you to stop the paper chase and consider a document imaging solution.

Simply put, document imaging solutions can transform the way your business operates. Whether you're solving a paper problem or simply improving the way you handle electronic files, the right document imaging solution can provide a wide range of benefits for businesses large and small.

If you have employees who spend most of the day filing or retrieving documents, or if you spend good money every month to warehouse old paper records, you should investigate a document management system.

Regulations requirements
More and more industries are falling under the influence of legislation that requires specific procedures for record keeping. Financial services companies need to be able to prove that information is unaltered to comply with Sarbanes-Oxley. Medical practices have to prove that their records are safe from prying eyes to comply with HIPPA. The legal industry also has specific requirements related to discovery, including full-text searching of massive amounts of documents.

For businesses in these more regulated industries, document imaging are by far the best way to ensure compliance with strict security and record-keeping rules. It's important to note that such systems only help your company become compliant, they don't guarantee it. But, the right procedures and behaviors do. No matter how secure your electronic records are, if an employee prints sensitive information and takes it to lunch, you're not in compliance.

Benefits of imaging services
Because they benefit business units shared by almost all companies, document management are used in a broad spectrum of businesses. Human resources and accounting departments, traditional heavy users of paper files, are huge beneficiaries of document management. Manufacturing and government are two sectors that pursue document management for these broader regulatory reasons.

Any organization that wants to put more processes in place can benefit as well. Document management systems are used to enforce naming conventions, ensure strict approval processes are followed, and generally add consistency to existing procedures.

Cost savings
One of the biggest hidden costs that paper-intensive businesses face is the time it takes to work with paper files. Say it takes a $20/hour employee five minutes to walk to a records room, locate a file, act on it, re-file it, and return to his desk. At just four files per day, that's over 86 hours per year spent filing - around $1700 in wages. At ten files per day, that shoots up to 216 hours per year - over five weeks' time, or $4300 - and that's only for one employee. A system that lets employees find and work with those documents without ever leaving their desks can instantly slash those costs.

Document management solutions also eliminate the "lost document" cost - the time it takes to recreate a document that's been destroyed or misplaced. Some suppliers estimate the cost of replacing each lost document at $250.

Additional cost savings come from the office space that can be freed by eliminating most paper records. With real estate costs at $15 to $40 per square foot in many major cities, converting records rooms into usable office space can save considerable amounts of money. In other cases, you may be able to eliminate warehousing costs for years of old records.

Security
If you're not taking data security seriously, you should be. Threats from outside (competition, identity thieves) and inside (disgruntled employees, employee theft) threaten the integrity and value of your most important information. Document management systems can provide several layers of security:

Disaster recovery
Whether your existing documents are paper or electronic, chances are you don't have adequate disaster recovery plans in place. Document management systems protect your paper records by creating electronic copies that can be backed up in multiple ways. They also can include off-site data backups and other steps to ensure that a fire, flood, or break-in won't cripple your business.

Access
Even as the Web makes it easier and easier for employees to work remotely, paper records remain a serious roadblock to distributed organizations. The right document management system allows your employees to access vital records from wherever they are. Simply allowing more than one employee to look at a file at the same time is a significant improvement over paper files. In addition, multi-layered access allows employees to see and change only the documents they're authorized to handle.

The next time someone requests information from a file, don't waste your time locating the document, pulling staples, making copies, making cover pages, faxing (sometimes more than once), retrieving confirmation reports, re-stapling, and re-filing the document. Just query for it by account number, invoice number, etc., and send it from your desktop computer. Save the time, effort, paper, toner, and staples doing it the old-fashioned way. Start saving money by turning to document imaging as your solution.

The Advantages of Document Scanning-Imaging Include: