The First Step - Digitizing Those Files

According to a study done by the US EPA, the average US office worker still generates up to 10,000 pages of paper per year. While we certainly don’t take kindly to killing trees, in our business that number concerns us less on an environmental standpoint and more with how much money that amount of paper is costing our customers. In addition, a study done by our friends at Gartner found it costs on average approximately $20 to file a document. Furthering that cost, the average document is copied at least nine times. NINE. While our conversation will eventually lead us to introduce our document capture and management solutions, the first step in battling the cost of paper is through document conversion. Given the figures above, the volume of files a company may be storing can easily rise into the 100,000's, if not millions. While these files may not need to be accessed frequently (if at all), they still are required for retention and legal purposes. Many companies may look at all the files they have in their file cabinets, let alone those kept in those bankers’ boxes and thrown in the storage closet or warehouse, and immediately feel overwhelmed. That’s where we come in.

If you haven’t seen what the new production scanners on the market are capable of, it has gotten pretty ridiculous. With capabilities of scanning over 200 pages per minute and an unlimited volume for daily use, in an average work day they can convert over 100,000 images into digital format. In our service bureau we have a fleet of these scanners specifically assigned for our customers to outsource their file scanning. Once converted to digital, these documents are indexed exactly how you would search for your documents if they were in a file cabinet. Date, invoice number, customer name – any way you’d like to retrieve these documents on your desktop can be done. Just imagine, all of those bankers boxes and seemingly endless amount of paper taken out in one fell swoop. No more worries about lack of office space, no more worries about misfiled or lost documents, and no more worries of compliance. By allowing us to do the scanning, companies are able to go about their current operations without allocating resources to take care of these complex tasks.

While a large part of our service bureau deals with accounting and customer files, we also have Large Format and Microfilm and Microfiche conversion services. Large format conversions can be a tricky one for many companies simply because the scanners required to convert them to digital are not quite as scalable as standard size scanners. With our Large Format scanners, we are capable of scanning engineering, architectural, construction, or any other sheets up to 48”. Like large format, film and fiche is also an area where our customers can be a nuisance to deal with on your own. Whether they need to be converted to tiff, PDF, or any other format, high speed film/fiche file conversion has been a specialty of ours since the doors were first opened. Conversely, we are also seeing clients revert to our archive writing services whereby we take digital files and convert them to analog film as an additional form of long term storage – whichever way you’re looking to go, we can take you there.

Getting your critical data stored electronically is fast becoming one of those “I’ll do it tomorrow” tasks. Today is yesterday’s tomorrow, and the quicker you decide to tackle this necessary process, the quicker your company starts saving money. Give us a call today 952-906-3022 and lets eliminate the paper headache together.