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It’s one of the first questions that comes to mind when a company wants to change its document management processes and there’s a wide range of ways you can do this.

The first thing to consider is what format you want to store your documents in; hard copy or digital? Once you’ve decided this, there are a few methods you can choose between so let me break it down.

Manual Document Management

Manually managing documents is the traditional method of storage and is still a favourite with lots of businesses across the country. Whether it’s the nostalgic love of paper or the need to have something physical in their hands, despite the rise in digital business, these people still prefer to store documents in the two methods below.

Office Storage

Think filing cabinets, folders and boxes. It’s probably the image you have in mind when you think of the average business office. Storing files like this is the most traditional method and the go-to way for a number of businesses but if we really think about it, there aren’t a great deal of benefits, it just seems to be a force of habit. Having said that, for a small number of documents, office storage can be the best method.

Off-Site Storage

Sometimes when there’s too many documents and files to fit on their premises, companies hire off-site facilities to store their documents securely. While this method is more secure than storing files in the office, it has an even slower document retrieval time because you have to request for the relevant document to be sent to you.

Digital Document Management

CD/DVD/USB

Storing digital images or files on a CD, DVD or USB means you can carry them on the go for remote site access. Files can be duplicated onto different systems, shared and viewed easily. The only downside to this method of storage is the risk of losing the CD, DVD or USB having not back the files up and the fact that you will always have to remember it when you know you’ll need to retrieve files.

Shared Network

With a shared network, the benefits are obvious; you have a network on which you can share your digital files with other members of staff or anyone else with access to the network. Shared networks can be based on a computer network or an online cloud platform. Both of these networks offer advantages but cloud storage has really taken off over the past few years because it offers the ability to access files at any time from any device with access to the internet.

Document Management System

Sometimes when companies decide to store their files digitally, they don’t have a system in place which can lead to some trouble managing the files. This is where document management software becomes a vital resource. It allows documents to be searched, organised and retrieved with ease. There are a wide range of choices of software ranging from simplistic to highly technical but the best thing to do is try one out and see if it suits your company.

Pearl Scan Can Help

Here at Pearl Scan, we provide document scanning services as well as document management consultancy to businesses, organisations and individuals from a wide range of industries including legal, HR, healthcare, education and finance.

We can scan any file from as small as a till receipt right up to a large format drawing or plan for which we can then provide image management software for your scanned images. We also have our own cloud platform, Pearl Cloud for you to host your files once they have been scanned.

If you would like some more information about our document scanning, management and storage services, check out our website or give us a call to receive your free, no obligation quote.

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The Scan-do People^tm


For more information feel free to give us a call: 
Nationwide: 0845 22 55 923          London: 0207 183 1885
Manchester: 0161 832 7991         Birmingham: 0121 285 1900

Do you find your days are wasted searching for documents and files with very few productive tasks actually being completed? Not only is your file management losing time, it could also be losing money and lowering morale too. Now’s the time to act!

Wasted Time

File Retrieval

Retrieving files from a manual storage system can be an extremely slow process, especially if your system is unorganised. It can be even worse if you store your documents in off-site storage facilities where you often have to wait days before the requested file is delivered.

Offsite Access

Nowadays, a lot of people work flexible hours with the option to work from home but this means if a member of staff is working from home and doesn’t have the document they need there they will have to travel to the office and retrieve it or have someone spend time finding it and getting it to them.

Sharing

To share a document stored manually, you will need to photocopy it or scan it so you can send it to the relevant people. Photocopying will also waste paper, ink and electricity.

Editing

Editing documents can be messy or involve the recreation of documents. This is time consuming and again wastes paper, ink and electricity.

Document Scanning Can Change This

File retrieval with Digital Documents

Once documents have been fully digitised, they should be indexed and have Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software applied to make the digital images fully text searchable. This will mean that when you need to find a file, you can do so with a simple text search of relevant details such as title, date, name etc. or even by searching words from the content of the document. With instant file retrieval, you and your staff will no longer have to waste time searching through filing cabinets, folders and boxes for the information you need.

Offsite Access with Electronic Document Management

Unlike physical files, digital documents are much more flexible. Depending on your digital file storage method, whether that’s on a shared network, secure FTP or cloud platform, you can have the opportunity to log into any device, from anywhere with access to the digital files. This gives the ability for employees to work from home without wasting time have information and documents delivered to them and will also cut down the number of unproductive tasks.

Sharing After Documents Have Been Scanned

Digital documents hold the advantage of being able to be shared quickly and easily through email or shared access to documents. This means that files and documents can be referred to the relevant people efficiently giving the ability to get quicker feedback and tasks can be completed quicker.

Editing Digital Documents

If a digital file needs editing, this can be done simply on the original document without the need to waste paper or ruin original copies. Software like Google Docs even allows more than one person to read and edit documents at the same time enabling a number of employees to complete tasks quickly, not just one.

Scanning Documents with Pearl Scan

Here at Pearl Scan we provide a completely bespoke document scanning service for clients wanting to reclaim the time they currently waste on an unreliable and inefficient manual system. We handle the entire process from collecting your documents with our secure nationwide collection service to the scanning and delivery of your high quality images in your required format via whichever method you want (CD, DVD, USB, secure FTP etc.) Our superfast scanners enable us to complete your projects within a quick turnaround so you can start reaping the benefits of going digital right away. You can check out our website for more information or get in touch to receive a quote for your scanning project.

Request a Quote   |   Contact Us    |    This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

The Scan-do People^tm


For more information feel free to give us a call: 
Nationwide: 0845 22 55 923          London: 0207 183 1885
Manchester: 0161 832 7991         Birmingham: 0121 285 1900

Companies and businesses are always looking for ways they can generate revenue with marketing campaigns and deals to attract new customers but there’s been one idea staring them in the face for a number of years now; document scanning.

What is Document Scanning?

Also known as document imaging, scanning is the digitisation of documents into the form of a digital image. The documents may be converted to PDF, TIFF, JPEG or a range of other formats and the digital image can then have software applied to make the text contained searchable. The switch to managing documents in this way can bring a great deal of benefits which I have spoken about in previous articles. One particular benefit which attracts a lot of businesses towards scanning services is the way it can generate revenue. This might sound like an impossible idea but it’s true. Let me explain...

How Can It Generate Revenue?

To make it understandable, I’m going to explain a situation that one of our clients were recently experiencing before they got in touch.

At the time, they were employing five members of staff to deal with the 2000+ proof of delivery (PODs) documents the company received on a daily basis. Each member of staff would manually deal with around 400 documents every day. Sometimes, in around 5% of the total documents completed, there would be a slight mistake which would mean that particular POD would need to be processed again and the client request dealt with by customer services then the corrected documents would be sent once again to their distribution department.

Assuming that each employee mis-processes around 20 of the 400 PODs per day (100 PODs overall), we can then calculate the money wasted correcting these mistakes. These 20 corrections would take around two hours for each employee to correct.

2 hours x 5 members of staff = 10 wasted hours.

If these staff are paid £10 per hour (as a round figure), those wasted hours equate to £100 per day. Of course that would be £500 per working week, adding up to a massive £26,000 annually!

So…

Were they to invest just £5000 in scanning services to digitise their PODs and remove the risk of human error in processing completely, they would STILL end up generating £21,000 extra revenue each year. By these savings, just 10 years of scanning and digital document management will make the company over £200,000 in revenue!

If you’re looking at that and thinking “my company could never generate that much revenue”, you’d be surprised. Even with a small company, switching to scanned and digitised documents can save time and space and, as a result, generate that revenue from the word go.

Document Scanning Services

Here at Pearl Scan we offer a bespoke yet affordable document scanning service which can help you on your way to generating more revenue straight away and for many years to come. We have worked with companies, organisations and individuals from a wide range of sectors including those who work with legal paperwork, healthcare records, HR files and education documents.

Along with our successful scanning service, we also offer some additional, optional extras such as OCR processing to make digital documents fully text searchable by their contents, document retrieval software to help you manage your digital documents efficiently, use of our cloud platform to secure documents online and secure shredding and disposal of your original documents. These services cost very little (and are sometimes even free) and can further aid the increase in revenue through efficiency boosts and space saving.

If you would like some more information about scanning documents with Pearl Scan or any of the additional extras, give us a call today. We can give you a free, no obligation quote for your scanning project and an estimation for how much money you might be wasting with your current processes.

Request a Quote   |   Contact Us    |    This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

The Scan-do People^tm


For more information feel free to give us a call: 
Nationwide: 0845 22 55 923          London: 0207 183 1885
Manchester: 0161 832 7991         Birmingham: 0121 285 1900