Icho Doc

If your company is planning to outsource its document scanning requirements, you’ll want to make sure you hire the contractor that’s right for your business. This article outlines some of the important factors to look out for and will give you some idea of the right questions to ask.

Scanning services required

Firstly you’ll need to ascertain which services you actually require – do you need just scanning and indexing services or a full document management solution?

Do you need hands-on help or just some consultation and advice?

Security

When it comes to documents, security is likely to be a key consideration for your company. Find out about a contractor’s security arrangements and how documents containing sensitive data will be handled. In some circumstances, contractors will need to be registered with the Data Protection Agency – ask about this too if you handle personal data.

Documents which need to be transferred to a contractor should be transferred using a secure courier service and all staff who handle confidential documents should be police-checked.

Ability

Don’t presume that all document scanning companies can meet your requirements. Ask them how long they have been established. Who have they worked for? What sectors do they have experience in?

It might be a good idea to ask for evidence and case studies of when a document scanning company has worked with another client with similar requirements to you.

Companies should also be ISO 9001 accredited and have a wide range of equipment to handle all types of documents and sizes.

Software and support

Some contractors are tied in with third-party vendors and may not be well placed to offer you the widest selection of solutions for your scanning needs.

Independent companies can choose from everything that’s available on the market to find the best solution for you.

Key questions to ask

These questions are a good start to help you choose the best scanning services contractor for you:

1. What relevant experience would your ideal contractor have?
2. Are there any key security issues which need to be considered?
3. What ongoing support do you need?
4. Once all your main files have been scanned, will you continue to maintain scanning in-house or do you require a contractor for this?
5. Do your documents include personal data?
6. What kind of documents can the contractor deal with?
7. What kind of equipment do they have available?

Despite all the technical progresses made every day, many companies still switch document capture solutions every few years. The process of acquiring documents and information securely and efficiently is too slow, the document and data capture software offers not enough ROI, or their system is not streamlined enough.

Every time a new system is installed, employees have to be retrained. That is an added expense on top of installing new systems. Why not do it right, and look into document capture solutions that are perfect for your document driven business? If you do not know exactly how to select a competitive, automated document capture solution, maybe the following 4 tips will be useful.

Tip 1– Only consider capture solutions that will fully integrate with your office management products. They have to be compatible with, for instance, your accounting, accounts receivable, and billing software.

Tip 2 — Web-based electronic systems are the way to go, as they offer the most benefits. Using web-based solutions eliminates the hassle of constantly installing and updating software on all your company computers. Web-based systems allow you access to your documents from any place with an Internet connection. This feature is turning increasingly more important as our mobility and communication possibilities increase.

Tip 3– When checking out your options, disregard the solutions that require frequent updates. It will save you time and money.

Tip 4 — Always ask for as much information as possible. Every company selling document solutions generally has several databases for you to choose from. Select the one that seems most compatible to your business.

There seems to be confusion between the term “document control” and the commonly used term “document management”. In fact, in many instances it appears that document management has become the generic term for anything that involves the handling of documents whether they are of a transient nature or are core to an organisation’s operations.

We will therefore attempt to clear up this area of confusion and to try to explain the differences between the two disciplines.

Document Management as a generic term means a system where documents can be securely stored, indexed and searched, accessed, version controlled, archived or deleted. Document Management can also create a collaborative environment permitting multiple users to access and modify documents and, at the front end, to scan hard copy documents and convert them into a digitised format where they can then be managed electronically.

Document Management systems have grown enormously in complexity over the years. At its beginning they involved the simple scanning of documents into microfiche for storage and then indexing for quick retrieval to their current position of umbrella status where they cover the electronic management of any type of information with the blurring of the lines between itself, Content Management (web pages) and Knowledge Management (unstructured data).

In its position as a generic term and umbrella status it could be said that document management involves the management of a high volume of documents that will largely include documents of a short lived nature. These can include emails, items of correspondence, contractual documents and scanned letters; which in general will have a single version existence.

Document Control on the other hand is more prescriptive in nature and involves the management (or control) of documents that are more essential to an organisation’s operations.

They are documents that have been put together for a specific use in mind, released for well thought out reasons and have gone through a recorded approval process to ensure relevance and accuracy. When the documents need to be modified to reflect changes in operations, the required changes and their reasons are identified, the person making the changes and the date of those changes are recorded and, importantly, the modified versions are separated from prior versions to prevent confusion.

It is important that access to the documents is regulated so that only the appropriate documents and their latest versions are available to the people who require them. In addition, out of date documents must be archived for historical purposes.

An audit trail of the events in the life of a document and its prior versions is a useful tool in being able to quickly access information about a document and should be included as a standard in a Document Control system.

Clearly these documents have many lives to reflect the normal changes that occur in an organisation and its operations with each life representing a change however slight from the previous one. The prior lives of the document, or versions, need to be accessible so that not only the progression of the document can be followed but also so that a prior version if appropriate can either be resurrected as the current latest version or be used as the template to build the latest version.

Given the similarity of both disciplines and the sameness of the terminologies it is easy to understand why confusion has rained and why the term document management is used as the generic term for the electronic handling of documents. But as a rule of thumb it is fair to say that a Document Control system could do the role of Document Management in an environment where the amount of transient documents is not too great; while care has to be taken to ensure that a Document Management system has the prescriptive elements in place, or able to be activated, to effectively act as a Document Control system.