Since as far back as the ‘90s organizations have found digitization to be a difficult process. Essentially, it’s because digitization imposes discipline and standardization on the company. This can be quite frightening for organizations that have depended on the hard work of a few hero employees to be successful. Unfortunately, this work may have been conducted in a more creative than optimal manner.
My role with these organizations is to understand their problems and then the team and I offer solutions. Over the years, one characteristic I’ve observed about these organizations is that they are afraid to take the first step. The reasons are many, here are a few of the most common:
I’m too busy with my other duties
It’s too much extra work for me
We don’t have the manpower
It’s too hard, I don’t want to change how I do things
Trust me, we get it. Digitization and going paperless is a huge organizational effort and it’s easy to see where staff might become nervous or overwhelmed. When we encounter agitated staff I like to sit with them to determine exactly what is the root cause of their fears. Often it is simply they think that along with their regular duties, they’ll be asked to scan in a tremendous backlog of paper files. For most companies, this is not the case at all. This is where I introduce the concept of scanning bureaus.
At CPS, we understand that companies may require bulk scanning of legacy (old) paper files. However, most offices have neither the equipment nor the manpower to do anything beyond ad-hoc scanning. A scanning bureau offers a range of scanning services that can’t be done in-house such as bulk scanning, archive scanning, and scan-on-demand services. Scanning bureaus are faster, more efficient and their scans tend to be of higher quality than desktop/in-house scanners. Besides, they are flexible enough to handle those emergency-must-be-scanned-now documents that come up now and again.
An additional bonus is in-house staff can have access to the document in Laserfiche upon scan. Other benefits to outsourcing your scanning include more office space and less paper, enhanced records management, improved business continuity, and best of all more time for strategic projects. Did you know an AIIM survey found it can take an average of 37 minutes to find one paper file? Document scanning streamlines file access across your organization. Files can be retrieved quickly and easily without having to leave your desk.
Using a service eases the difficulty of taking that first step toward digitization. My goal here is to encourage you to consider taking that very first step toward going paperless, we’ve got you.
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