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Pundits have been predicting the
“paperless office” for over twenty years and yet, the
amount of paper found in most offices has continued to
steadily INCREASE. It is the burden of coping with this
onslaught of paper that makes scanning such a valuable
alternative.
- Cost of
storing documents – Buying more and more filing
cabinets and housing them in expensive office space
represents a potentially huge and unwarranted cost.
Trying to deal with this issue by storing documents
off-site in either a company-owned facility or with a
third-party service introduces both new costs and
additional challenges, notably timely access to
information.
- Time required
to file and retrieve documents – A significant amount
of an organization’s scarce and costly labour is spent
filing and retrieving documents. In many instances, the
issue is so extreme that full-time staff are literally
dedicated to the task (but others in the organization
still spend much of their time performing the chore).
- Poor
responsiveness to customer and operational inquiries –
Even if the documents are filed ‘properly’ and locally, an
inordinate amount of time can be consumed retrieving (and
if necessary forwarding) the information. Unfortunately,
this ‘ideal’ scenario often doesn’t hold true as documents
are frequently misplaced, already in use by another
person, totally lost, or need to be searched-for at some
remote storage facility. The poor turnaround time is
clearly damaging to the organization’s reputation and
operational effectiveness.
- Time spent
copying / faxing / routing documents – Moving paper
throughout an organization (e.g. gaining payment approval
for an invoice) is tedious at best. To try and prevent
total loss, copies are often made first (resulting in more
storage!) and time delays get introduced. The issue is
exacerbated when the documents need to get moved between
remote offices and/or remote third-party organizations.
- Disaster
recovery – Most organizations have a well-defined
disaster recovery plan in-place for their I.T. databases
(e.g. regular back-ups, off-site copies, etc.).
Unfortunately, a HUGE and often under-appreciated exposure
remains with their hard-copy documents (e.g. flood, fire,
explosion, theft, etc.)
- Compliance
– Organizations need to satisfy the compliancy
requirements of government and security bodies in regards
to document retention (in some instances for up to ten
years!) and supporting materials for audits or audit
narratives. Trying to satisfy these demands with a
paper-based office, especially given some of the
above-mentioned issues.
- Better control
/ security over who can access what documents --
Maintaining proper access control to paper-based documents
introduces yet another layer of challenges. Housing the
files in secure locations and controlling who has
key/combination access are but two of the issues
surrounding these sensitive documents.
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