Implementing the Best document scanning services into your business can reduce costs, increase efficiency, and strengthen your bottom line. But, without understanding some of the nuances of document scanning services, you may not experience these benefits to their fullest.
Don’t trust Multi-Function Printers (MFPs)
First and foremost, it can be tempting to implement document scanning services in-house using your existing equipment. Often, your existing equipment means an MFP, or multi-function printer. MFPs are convenient as they offer scanning, printing, and copying all in one.
But, the cost of this all-in-one functionality is a decrease in speed, reliability, and even capability. When comparing an MFP to a dedicated document scanner, you’ll find major differences in its capabilities. Document scanners can support the scanning of many different forms of documents including even-odd formats like microfilm.
Document scanners also support different options for saving and exporting files, important for maximizing the space, efficiency, and compatibility of your files.
They’re also significantly faster, especially at batch printing. Most MFPs scanning ability is relatively slow, taking several moments to scan each side of the page, but a dedicated scanner can accept an entire batch of documents at once and scan both sides simultaneously.
2. OCR can’t do it all (yet)
OCR (Optical Character Recognition) has come quite far in recent years with the addition of machine learning helping to increase the speed and accuracy of the technology and its ability to identify characters in documents. But, not all file formats can be read by OCR and even with machine learning, human verification is needed at times when OCR just can’t identify text.
The nuances of old English cursive couldn’t be accurately read by OCR so we had manually entered all the data by hand.
3. Don’t forget the prep work!
It may seem relatively minor, but you’ll need to account for the preparation of your documents when you implement document scanning services. Will they often have paper clips or staples that must be removed?
Maybe documents need to first be sorted into batches and separated from others. These are all important considerations to make when implementing document scanning services as they’ll impact both the time and manpower that it requires.
This means there will be increased costs both for in-house and outsourced operations.
4. Outsourcing can be as cheap as a couple of cents per document
An important tip for implementing document scanning services is to outsource, especially for large batches of documents. Outsourced document scanning services can be as cheap as a couple of pennies for each document.
It’s way cheaper than in-house document scanning, and in many cases more efficient too! With some of our own clients, we’ve been able to scan their documents 50% faster than their in-house estimates.
In addition to time savings and lower costs, outsourced document scanning can even be more accurate! Thanks to established processes, you’ll benefit from more reliable digitizing of documents and thus, more accurately scanned and saved materials.
This isn’t even mentioning the cost of new scanners and software you’re potentially avoiding by outsourcing! To get a better idea of just how much money you’ll be saving by outsourcing, get a free quote now.
5. Calculate cost savings based on process improvements, not the volume of documents
An important tip for implementing document scanning services is to base your cost savings and ROI not on the volume of documents but on the process improvements. It’s easy to try and break down ROI by document, as it can be more tangible, but it actually provides a very poor look at how much document scanning services are helping your organization.
Instead, take a look at how it’ll improve your existing systems and save employees time. For example, your finance department may no longer need to scan all invoices received and thanks to that have more time to analyze cash flow, hunt down rebates, and negotiate steep discounts!
