Document Imaging Blog

Moving Down the Paperless Trail

"It's cheaper, it's easier, it gives you and your employees more flexibility, your savvier competitors are doing it, and since it requires flexibility it gives small businesses an advantage over large ones."

Wow...that's a pretty compelling argument. What's it about? It's Slate.com's BizBox's description of "going electronic" in an article summarizing an interview that fellow blogger and eCopy employee, Bill Brikiatis, did with Forbes.

The full article provides lots of good information for companies to consider when working to reduce the amount of paper in their work environment, but here's a few high-level takeaways that BizBox called out to backup their statement above:

1. Electronic is faster
2. The transition away from paper requires institutional flexibility, and that gives small businesses a leg up over big ones
3. At this point, being primarily paper-based is inefficient, because everyone's already partly electronic-based
4. Don't forget security

All good arguments for why to move towards a paperless environment. Are you working on a paperless initiative? Tell us how you are going about it and how you are justifying your initiatives!

Reducing Paper in Document Workflows

I’ve been spending some time lately putting together before and after workflow diagrams of some of our customer implementations and had an interesting realization. It seems that too often we get laser focused on how many steps are reduced in a “before and after” solution. And we believe that a reduction in steps from 9 to 7 is not as good as a reduction from 9 to 6.

What I am realizing is that this may not always be the case with document imaging. With document imaging, the workflow improvements come from the reduction of paper, and the resulting manual processes. Yes, there may be a reduction in steps as well. But, in some cases, there may actually be steps added as more electronic systems are touched.  However, there is always a reduction in the time spent on steps, since working with electronic information is vastly quicker than working with paper.

Not surprisingly, the workflows that showed the biggest improvements in time spent (and therefore $$) were the ones that moved the scanning process closest to the beginning of the workflow. With document imaging, it’s not a complicated message -- the earlier that paper is eliminated, the more efficient the remainder of the workflow is.

Keys for SharePoint Success

Microsoft has created a major presence in the enterprise content management market with Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007.

A recent article by Barb Mosher of CMS Wire looked at what it takes to have a successful SharePoint implementation. The article featured an interview between Errin O’Connor, Founder & CEO from EPC Group and me on improving office workflows with SharePoint.

From Barb’s perspective, here are the takeaways from Errin’s interview:

 “Implementations must be carefully planned - doing it wrong the first time will lead to a lot more money spent later on to fix the problem - where are your cost savings then?
 “Governance is critical from an IT perspective in terms of its support, maintenance, updates and SharePoint’s use as an application development platform
 “Governance is also critical from a business perspective: provisioning sites and content, guidelines and communication strategies and overall management
 “Have a roadmap and a communications plan - don’t try to do it all at once and make sure everyone knows the plan”

Many Microsoft-focused organizations are using SharePoint for managing electronic content and supporting collaboration. The value of this implementation increases exponentially with the ability to store paper-based content with your Microsoft Office and other electronic documents in your SharePoint repository.

Kick the Tires on Document Imaging Solutions

eCopy is hosting a free, one-day conference where business and IT professionals can learn more about document imaging solutions. eCopy Discovery Day takes place on October 9 in Boston. 

The conference will provide an excellent venue for organizations with existing or planned document imaging projects. Not only does the day include educational sessions but it also has an exhibit pavilion where all participating vendors are available for individual consultations.

Here’s an opportunity to discuss your organization’s specific document imaging requirements with companies such as eCopy, EMC, Canon, HP, Microsoft, Ricoh and others. The exhibit pavilion will have more than 50 software products integrated with the top MFP and scanner brands, allowing you to see these solutions in action.

The conference takes place at the Westin Copley Place Hotel in Boston. Attendance is free with advance registration and walk-ins will be charged $50.

OpenText Acquires Captaris – More Emphasis on Front-Office Capture

More consolidation happened in the ECM space last week with Open Text’s announcement that they will be acquiring Captaris. In the press release, Open Text CEO stated that “Captaris’s technology will strengthen Open Text’s ECM solutions by providing another on-ramp for integrating content into our ECM solutions.”

This acquisition is further evidence that capture – one of the primary elements of ECM according to AIIM – is continuing to be looked at more closely by major ECM players, especially in terms of front-end capture. ECM vendors recognize the need to let any office worker add paper-based information to their applications. It is no longer good enough to just offer a batch or production-type imaging solution for ECM systems. Front-office workers have access to scanning devices, and organizations are recognizing that serious efficiencies can be realized by letting them scan paper-based information earlier in business processes -- eliminating the need to move paper within an organization and making that information available earlier.

And just as we talked about last week in regards to selecting document imaging software that can be used across multiple scanning platforms, the same is true for integration with back-end systems. So, you want to look for a document imaging solution that can integrate with multiple back end applications, providing front-office workers with a common interface at their scanning devices for capturing and distributing paper-based information.