Document Imaging Solutions Become Relevant in Many Typical Business Situations

Contracts and agreements are typical paper-based documents created in large volumes by large enterprises. Once executed, these documents are retrieved only infrequently thereafter. However, when a need arises, as for litigation, the documents should be quickly retrievable.

In litigation, you're dealing with attorneys who charge high per-hour fees and if time is wasted because relevant documents could not be retrieved fast enough, you are also incurring avoidable expenses.

Additionally, there can be problems if the contract is not renewed when due, owing to problems in retrieving the old contract. The particular contract could even be lost to a competitor.

Retrieval can indeed be slow if these are kept as paper documents filed in paper folders that are stored in filing cabinets in filing rooms at numerous geographic locations, as is likely to be the case for a global enterprise.

Distributed Access to Documents

One major problem with paper-based contracts is that it's difficult for other offices to refer to it. If another office or the head office attorney needed to review the contract, the originating office will have to fax it to them, or ship the original document, or resort to some other similar procedure. All of these involve locating the contract from among the numerous paper documents stored in the file room.

A document imaging solution helps organizations in such a situation. The paper documents can be converted to electronic images, and processed further to make them into machine-readable text documents. Next are the steps of indexing and metadata creation. Documents will have metadata such as tags and brief content summaries attached to them.

The electronic documents can be stored in a central server that can be searched by authorized persons from anywhere, provided they have Internet access. This would truly be distributed access, very different from the earlier cumbersome process.

Safer Storage of Paper Documents

With the easy access provided to the electronic images of original documents, it would be only on rare occasions that the original paper document would need to be accessed. This makes it possible to store these in a separate, specialized facility that can take precautions against damage to paper from exposure to the environment.

A specialized facility can also manage incidental issues like retention periods and destruction of the documents that have completed their retention period.

This is far different from the earlier environment where the documents were stored in multiple filing rooms that had to be easily accessible when needed. Busy as they were with locating documents, staff in these earlier facilities would rarely have had time to attend to retention and destruction issues. The result is constantly accumulating paper in their filing rooms.

Conclusion

A complete document imaging solution that converts paper documents into machine-readable electronic text documents, and then goes on to index and describe them to facilitate searching, can transform the entire document management scenario in large enterprises. In addition to making the documents globally, and quickly, accessible, the new scenario enables safer and more systematic handling of the original paper documents.

Costs will be lower, compliance with regulations will be better, business processes will be speedier and litigation will be less expensive under this new scenario.

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