Workflow software for document imaging and management

With a document management workflow, double input of the same document is finally a thing of the past. You can prevent delays and mistakes at work thanks to instant electronic document retrieval within your electronic documents, allowing you to check whether a certain document is there without wasting more than a minute of your time. Imagine the potential savings in paper file storage costs and the workforce that’s in charge of managing and retrieving it.

Preparing the documents for scanning – removing staples, adapting the size, sorting...

While paper feeding and scanning can be done automatically and quickly, preparation and indexing are necessary and require much work by humans. Preparation involves a manual workflow inspecting the papers to be scanned and making sure that they are in order, unfolded, without staples or anything else that might jam the scanner. Additionally, some industries such as legal and medical may require documents to have Bates Numbering or some other mark giving a document identification number and date/time of the document scan.

Capture images of paper documents using scanners or multifunction printers. Use optical character recognition (OCR) software to convert digital images into machine readable text.

The scanning or digitization of paper documents for storage makes different requirements of the scanning equipment used than scanning of pictures for reproduction.

Some software has workflow capabilities, allowing for easy batch scanning. When scanning large quantities of documents with document management workflow software, speed and paper-handling is very important, but the resolution of the scan will normally be much lower than for good reproduction of pictures.

Indexing may be as simple as keeping track of unique document identifiers; or it can take a more complex form, providing classification through the documents' metadata or even through word indexes extracted from the documents' contents. Indexing exists mainly to support retrieval.

Indexing involves associating keywords to files so that they can be retrieved by content. This proces can sometimes be automated into a workflow to some extent, but is likely to involve manual labour. One common practice is the use of barcode-recognition technology: during preparation, barcode sheets with folder names are inserted into the document files, folders, and document groups. Using automatic batch scanning, the documents are saved into the appropriate folders, and an index is created for integration into document management workflow systems.

You can store your electronic documents, easily optimise the tree structure of your information, then put it on a portable file storage carrier such as a USB stick or a CD for backup or sharing. You can literally have a complete digital document archive with you in your pocket, at all times!

Fast access means fast solutions. With good document management workflow software, information is always present, 24 hours a day, on a portable data storage unit or on your organisation’s network. After proper indexing, this can be as simple as typing in a few words from the content of the document. That makes for fast and easy document retrieval that makes sure you always have the latest version of a document available at your fingertips.

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