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Originally Submitted by Rose Mananghaya on Wed, 05/07/2014 – 23:48 

How many sheets of paper do you think the world wastes in a year? According to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, an average employee in the U.S. wastes 10,000 sheets of paper in a year. How about the rest of the world?

These days, going paperless may not necessarily mean going green but more of a way of improving collaboration and the process within an organization. The availability of document imaging systems and document management software have made it easier for companies to transition to the cloud and to a paperless way of managing documents.

The first step in going paperless is of course, converting physical documents to a digital copy. This is a process called document capturing or document scanning. For most companies that haven’t started scanning their documents yet, they have to deal with bulk document scanning. What companies need to know is that this is not a short process – it takes time and effort and may be best when handled by professional document imaging or document management experts.

Here are some information that you need to know in document capture or scanning:

1. You need have the right hardware and software. When capturing and organizing documents, you need three technology solutions in your workspace: a scanning and indexing software, a document scanner, and a document retrieval system. A good quality scanner will help make the job faster while the scanning and indexing software will help organize the scanned documents to prepare it for use in the document retrieval system. There are scanners in the market that can scan up to 20 pages or even up to 60 per minute but choosing one would depend on your timeline and the bulk of documents needed to be scanned.

Our organization recommends to use Kofax Express version 3.1 as the scanning and indexing software while Enadoc as the document retrieval system. For the past 15 years, we have tested every brand and type of scanners and only select an appropriate scanner depending on our client’s requirements.

2. Damages, folds, torn, and large documents should be addressed. There is a lot of work when preparing the documents for scanning. Since the physical documents will be fed on the scanners, staples, paper pins, or clips should be removed and folds should be unfolded. Meanwhile, torn documents should be repaired with cello tapes.

If the document surpasses the maximum scanning document size of the scanner, the document should be photocopied and resized before starting the scanning process.

3. Ensure the quality of captured documents by keeping the scanner clean. To ensure that document scanning goes smoothly, the scanner should be kept clean. Staples, paper pins, clips, dust, metal parts, and gum can cause damage to the scanner. The scanner should be kept in an area free from water, dust, and high temperature.

For every 3,000 pages scanned, the scanner should be cleaned. Use an air blower to clean the dust to the inside of the scanner while use the static viper to clean the image guilds and rollers.

4. Physical documents are linked to its digital copy using barcodes. In document scanning, specially designed barcode sheets should be used to record document types and other index information as well as act as to act as separator to the different documents.
5. Quality of the documents is ensured after scanning. The job is still not done after scanning as the quality of the documents are ensured through a series of processes:

• Addressing unseparated documents, particularly two barcodes corresponding to one document
• Deleting blank or unwanted pages
• Rotation of pages
• Changing the color mode to get a clear view
• Enhance the visibility images with bad quality
• Usage of incorrect separator sheet types
• Replacing folded pages
• Inserting missing pages

For organizations that need help in document capture, we provide document capture and data entry services. For the past 15 years, we have tried every brand and type of scanners to capture billions of documents. Today, we employ over 500 document capture professionals across the Asian region and its international offices.

Our team are composed of technical experts who are CompTIA Certified Document Imaging Architects (CDIA+) as well as team leaders certified by the Project Management Institute (PMP). We are also a trade member of the Association of Information and Image Management (AIIM).

For more information about our services please visit: http://enadoc.com/services.html