An Introduction to Document Scanning

What is ERM/EDM? EDM or ERM is all about the way that we deal with processes that involve paperwork. As computer systems have evolved over the years, many people believed that the amount of paperwork would be drastically reduced, perhaps even leading to the paperless office. Indeed, in a few cases this has proved correct and I am led to believe that some organizations have managed to go paperless, however, I am yet to find one of these organizations. In fact, what seems to have occurred is that despite a smaller percentage of data ending up in the printer, the overall volume of data has grown so much that the overall amount of printed material has also risen.

Much of this printed data does not need to be kept as it will also exist in electronic format. However, some items cannot simply be disposed of. Organizations will always have a need to keep hold of certain documents for legal or regulatory reasons. The type of documents and the time that they are to be kept (the Retention Period) will vary from industry to industry. However, many of these documents can be kept in an electronic format, scanned and made available on your computer systems.

Using the latest EDM/ERM solutions, many documents can now be scanned into an electronic format, this can be done in a way that allows the document to remain legally compliant, even to the extent that the digital copy will be admissible in court - so long as the proper procedures are followed. Once scanned to an electronic format, this paperwork no longer takes up valuable office space nor does it necessarily need to be stored in off-site archive. Furthermore, it can be accessed instantly by any authorized person within your organization and shared electronically at the click of a mouse. Very often, by making the information widely available within the organization, further efficiencies are found be the de-duplication of tasks.

In short, through the digitization of paper based records, organizations can benefit from extra space, the freedom of information to be accessed around the organization or even routed automatically through established business processes - workflow solutions.

Key EDM/ERM terms

Prep / Pre Scan Preparation Documents arrive for scanning in various formats. Sometimes there are simply reams of A4 pages neatly organized in boxes. More often however, the documents are contained within files, often stapled and un-structured. The prep process is designed to organize these documents ready for scanning. This will involve the removal of all folders, staples and paperclips, the unfolding of folded pages and the repair of damaged documents. This process allows the documents to be scanned in an efficient manner.

Document Separator Pages Although this is strictly part of the Prep and or Indexing process it is best explained separately. Document separators can be as simple as a page with a specific pattern that tells the scanner software that a new document has started or more complicated sheets that use barcodes for the automatic capture of index data. These barcodes can often be incorporated into commonly used documents to reduce the indexing costs.

Substitution Sheets Substitution sheets are used where mixed page sizes occur within a document. Mixed page sizes may mean that different document scanners are required to scan one document. Often, large format items will be removed from the document and replaced with a substitution sheet. These large items can then be processed through large format scanners with the remaining document being scanned on more conventional devices. The software then marries the two resulting sets of output images into one complete set.

Scanning / Capture This is the process of digitization. Digitization can be via an inexpensive low volume scanner or via more advanced technology capable of scanning 10's or even 100's of thousands of pages in a day. Document scanners are able to scan in full color, black and white or grayscale and varying levels of quality according to the required resolution. Scanners can often scan both sides of every sheet in one pass, automatically removing blank pages as they are found

Indexing / Data Capture During this process, key information is gathered about a document that has been scanned. It is this key information that is then used to retrieve the document when it is required or to trigger an automated process. The quality of this information is paramount and as such it is usually keyed from the scanned image. Sometimes, where the data is very important it is double keyed, by separate operators and the software flags up any miss-matches in the keyed data. Software can also be used for this purpose, see Optical Character Recognition (OCR) and Forms Recognition. Furthermore, document separators can be created which contain this data for automatic capture through the use of bar codes (see above).

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