It’s been suggested that document scanning would help your business. Get all your paper scanned into image form so you can share documents with your employees and partners. Go paperless. Streamline your business process. Get rid of all that paper stored in those rusty old filing cabinets. Let your customer service people call up claims and invoices on their PCs to immediately answer an inquiry. Better control who has access to what information within your business.
It sounds fantastic. What have you been waiting for? So you buy a scanner, hook it up to your network and you slide your first piece of paper into the feeder. Now what? Cue the spooky music… You have entered the “capture zone.”
Yes, you have a scanner, and maybe you have a place to store images, like a database or a document management system. But how do you scan images so you can find them later? You need a good method for adding indexes, just like a library does with its books, and attach them to the image, so you’ll have something to search. You might have one index be the scan date, another could be a document number, yet another could be the department that created the document.
However, what if it was created outside the company, like an invoice or a piece of correspondence? OK, so now you’re going to need different sets of indexes, depending on the document you’ve scanned. Invoices have one set of indexes (invoice number, vendor number, total), sales orders another (salesperson, order date, SKUs), HR documents yet another (date of birth, SSN, employee number, etc.).
Virtually every document management vendor, from IBM down to the smallest desktop imaging appliance on the market today, offers a simple capture interface. The scanner manufacturers will sell you one too, as will the capture vendors, like Datacap. Typically, this basic capture software has an interface to view the scanned image, and a few panels to manually type in the indexes you want on each image. When it’s time to store the images, these systems attach the index data to the image in the desired format for search and retrieval later.
It is capture at its most simple. And for organizations with a small volume of documents and modest expectations, this can be a sufficient solution. But don’t for a second think that this is all there is to capture. After more than 20 years, capture software has evolved into very sophisticated systems for document ID and data extraction.
Kevin Craine, author of “Designing a Document Strategy,” has written “The Five Phases of Capture.” He describes the above scenario as the First Phase, “Scan and Store,” with four others of increasing complexity and automation. If you want to see the full capture continuum and gauge your position on it, click here to register for the paper. Or you could go back and play with your new scanner.
