Paper Cuts: Why Your Allegiance to Paper Files Could Be Bleeding Your Business

The customer is always right—that's the old adage. These days it’s even more than that, though. The customer determines whether or not your business thrives. A bad review or a negative testimonial online can have serious implications for any company, and it can be difficult to get rid of the bad press once it’s been posted. And unfortunately, bad reviews are much louder than good ones—the White House Office of Consumer Affairs reports that news of poor customer service reaches twice as many people as does praise for good customer service. Research also shows that it takes 12 positive experiences to make up for just one unresolved negative experience. 

The best defense against unhappy customers is pretty obvious: provide great customer service. But it’s not just as simple as that. Try as you might, if your business hasn’t yet made the move toward a paperless or reduced-paper office, you might be missing out on opportunities to be there for your customers.

Unfortunately, research from the Gartner Group shows that professionals spend 50% of their time searching for information, with an average of 18 minutes spent to locate a document. Additionally, an estimated 15% of paper documents end up misplaced or misfiled. And those misplaced documents can cost a lot more to find and replace than you might think. See some of the costs associated with paper documents here. 

It’s hard to imagine that, given how much time employees spend on these menial tasks, they are really serving customers to their fullest potential. 

The good news is that it doesn’t have to be this way! You can stop paper’s takeover of your office and get your employees back to doing what they’re good at: making your customers happy. All you have to do is take out the part of the equation that’s costing your employees their valuable time—paper.

But where do you start? It’s got to be a lot of work to get all of your company’s existing files into digital form, right? It’s actually a surprisingly simple process if you choose the right tools. Let us show you how. Visit psigen.com and take a look around, or contact one of our experts here. 

The Cloud: 5 Things to Do Before Adopting Cloud ECM

Don't Let the Cloud Kill Your Network

Companies have been slow to adopt cloud-based ECM for a variety of reasons: security, perceived lack of control and lack of integration.  Scanning high image volumes to the cloud can kill your network, and cause major issues.  Take these 5 steps to make sure a smooth roll out:

1. Assessment is key.  Doing a file assessment and analysis should be done immediately.   Take a deep dive into each of your departments, and figure out their scanning and capture needs.  Does your legal department want to scan 500 page documents?  Is back-scanning of file cabinets going to be a major portion of the project?  Does marketing want to scan full-page color?  Key areas to be identified are: large document scanning, color requirements, and high volume areas.  For more information on planning and assessment see here:   Scanning Planning
2.  Check your internet bandwidth, and monitor.  IT involvement from a monitoring perspective will be key to ensure you proper bandwidth to support your scanning efforts.  Batch uploads from large file scanning can kill bandwidth quickly, and create a user revolt.  Proof of concept and single department implementations can give great insight into network impact, and provide some great stats for follow on phase roll outs.
3.  Check your device settings, and control them.  Most scanners and copiers today will scan in full color if you let them.  File sizes vary to the extreme between black and white, grayscale and color.  Along with color settings, DPI should be controlled, and in most cases 200 DPI black and white is sufficient for most organizations needs.  Nothing kills a party like a 500MB color scan!!  Tips for Scanning Copier settings:  Copier Settings that Kill
4. Check your server side settings.   Does your ECM System  set file upload limitations.  Make sure from your file assessment that you will be able to handle all file sizes required.  If you cannot control these settings, or your provider will not change them, make sure you use a capture technology that can perform file splitting for you .
5. Timing can be key.  Depending on your requirements, it may be necessary to control large uploads.  For example, some customers have chosen to do their back scanning and large uploads during off hours / weekends so as to not impact daily operations.  Others will coordinate with a 3rd party scanning service to perform all their high volume scanning off site, with a planned, controlled upload during off hours.

Anything I missed?  Comments from the trenches?  Please post your comments.

SharePoint Scanning Case Studies

Ran into a great site with some really cool Scan to SharePoint Case Studies.  This company is out of the UK, Datafinity, and has several deployments where customers are scanning and capturing documents into SharePoint libraries.  Here are some summaries:

Kepak Group is a young, professional and dynamic business that has grown into one of Europe's leading food processing companies employing over 2000 people in nine manufacturing facilities across Ireland and the UK. Kepak installed PSI:Capture to manage the scanning and indexing of a growing volume of personnel files that needed to be stored and managed. PSI:Capture links to payroll and HR systems to retrieve index data, converts the HR files into text-searchable PDFs and transfers the files to SharePoint 2010.  “PSI:Capture has enabled us to scan large volumes of documents into pre-defined structures in SharePoint with the use of very simple drop-down menu options and links to our HR system” said Aine Black, HR Manager, Kepak Group. Read full case study

Haulfryn Group Ltd, an operator of holiday and residential mobile home parks across England and Wales, decided to deploy PSI:Capture Enterprise as their SharePoint 2010 Document Capture solution.  Using PSI:Capture in conjunction with Kodak document scanners, they now have an end to end capture solution that provides unmatched speed and automation, along with a simple, yet powerful user interface.  “PSI:Capture has made our whole scanning process robust,” said Stephen Lattimore, Business Process Manager for Haulfryn.  “We can now quickly reference our documents in SharePoint 2010 for audit and service.”  Along with the current scanning process, Haulfryn plans to add the processing of survey forms and other documents in the near future. Read full case study

The Fire Brigades Union, headquartered in Kingston-upon-Thames, needed a way to store large volumes of paper documents in their newly deployed Microsoft SharePoint 2010 document management system. They evaluated several scanning and OCR products available on the market before choosing PSI:Capture, because of its ease of use, quick implementation and unparalleled interface to SharePoint. The Union now scans many thousands of documents a day which are converted into text-searchable PDFs and stored in SharePoint providing instant access to all paper information for the Union staff located throughout the UK. Read full case study

Isos Housing, a housing association headquartered in Newcastle upon Tyne, is responsible for the day-to-day management of almost 12,000 homes across the North East, from Berwick in the north down to Stockton in the south, and across to Cumbria in the west. The company adopted PSI:Capture to enable them to automate the scanning and storage of invoices and other accounting documents in their Microsoft SharePoint system. PSI:Capturereads unique barcode references created from their accounting system, Open Accounts, to index and organise documents in SharePoint for quick and easy access by staff in their four offices across Northumberland.

Featured Webinar: Your Profit is in Danger

Your Profit is in Danger

Join us for a Webinar on September 10 Space is limited. Reserve your Webinar seat now at: https://www1.gotomeeting.com/register/778535032 This joint webinar with PSIGEN and OPEX will focus on how to improve document scanning efficiency through a combination of PSIGEN PSI:Capture Enterprise and OPEX hardware.  See how you can reduce prep time and save on labor, improving your margins and driving higher profits. Title: Your Profit is in Danger Date: Tuesday, September 10, 2013 Time: 10:00 AM - 11:00 AM PDT After registering you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the Webinar. System Requirements PC-based attendees Required: Windows® 8, 7, Vista, XP or 2003 Server Mac®-based attendees Required: Mac OS® X 10.6 or newer Mobile attendees Required: iPhone®, iPad®, Android™ phone or Android tablet

Mobile Capture? Really?

The Document Management industry is all about mobile capture right now. Really? Taking pictures of documents, page by page, with a tablet/smart phone camera. Some of the biggies in the industry are spending huge amounts of money promoting the cause, and building complex infrastructures and image processing to handle these types of images. There are a number of new startups, like StratusFlow, that are focusing on solving the key problem through the cloud.  Want to see a simple solution? Video below uses Microsoft SkyDrive, an iPad and PSI:Capture on the backend to read barcode photos and process the data.

 

How do you want to find your documents?

Document Capture Drives Search

One of the first stages in planning for any scanned image repository is to ask the question: How do you want to find your documents?  Theories vary on best practices, but here are a few tips when designing a document capture implementation for any ECM system:

1. Limit your number of fields to 5 or less. So many times i see document scanning customers use way to many fields during capture.  The more fields you have, the more time for end users to index their documents, and the more chances fields will get skipped.  Take the time to interview the end users and truly find how they need to search for their documents.
2. Always use a date.  Dates are the ultimate filter that can be a life saver when searching for that needle in a haystack in a scanned document repository.  Invoice date, purchase order date, contract date, etc. give you the power to narrow down your search results to a specified period and can be a huge help in audit based searches or searches for legal support.
3. Use automation to reduce indexing time.  Document capture applications provide automation and efficiency, and can reduce end user keying requirements on documents.  Strong, accurate OCR technology, and Advanced Data Extraction (ADE) are absolutely required.
4. Ensure your technology has a QA step.  If you are going to go to all the trouble of scanning, capturing and migrating documents to a repository, make sure you can check your work.  Misfiling a document can a painful experience.
5. Full text search is the insurance policy.  Always, I repeat always, convert your scanned documents to a searchable format, PDF Image with Hidden text.  This will allow for granular searches beyond your index fields/columns, and can help you in the "find a needle in the haystack" tasks.  But do not, I say, do NOT rely on full text search as your primary search method.  Full text does not let you sort by specific document focused dates, cannot let you do range based searches on specific criteria, and restricts sorting and viewing in most repositories.

Just a few tips when designing your document scanning index fields.

Oooops. Did someone backup the paper?

If you  look at the headlines over the past few years, you cannot help but notice the number of natural disasters that have occurred.  In my conferences with IT and Departmental Management, I always pose the question when discussing business continuity or disaster planning: Do you have a plan for your paper?   Just about every company has implemented some type of plan for backing up their important digital files.  Some go to the extreme with data snapshots that can be recovered from multiple locations.  But companies typically don't take the same strategy with their paper assets.  The good ole file cabinet, the protector of all things paper will provide protection, right? Companies need to take a good hard look at their paper, and assess the business impact should disaster destroy their file room.  Backing up your paper nowadays is not hard, nor expensive when compared to the legal implications and time it would take to reproduce (if possible) contracts, customer files, sales records and the like. Any paper backup plan involves a concept i call Bridging the Gap (BTG).  BTG involve hardware and capture software to digitize and build the bridge to the digital world, and then a repository on the "other side" to house the records and make search and retrieval simple.  The repository can be as simple as a set of named network folders, or as complex as a true ECM system like MS SharePoint.  Take the initiative and backup your paper today.