What scanning WON’T do
Replacing paper with electronic files saves space and generally makes the working environment a much nicer place. What it won’t do, left to itself, is help you find information when you need it. This requires indexing – the creation of searchable metadata (a techie term for information that’s attached to a document but not a part of it).
DocuStor offers the simple means of viewing each scanned document in turn and applying this data. It’s a fine balancing act knowing how much manpower to put into this operation: put a lot of man-hours up front to index everything or take the view that the frequency of retrieval will be so low as to make more than minimal expended on this function not worthwhile in terms of return on the investment.
So you have to choose – low expenditure at front end or low expenditure at back end. Choose unwisely and your document scanning project could end up with additional costs outweighing the benefits of moving away from your paper files.
Why choose? Have both!
Many documents contain standard information that can be identified and automatically extracted for use as searchable indexes. Furthermore, this can often be linked with information from other sources to provide a powerful database enabling a user to find a document on the flimsiest of known information. And with the right tools, this can be achieved with the very minimum of manual intervention, so the circle is squared – you have the means of retrieving any document in seconds without having spent a fortune on providing the means to do so.