Document Imaging in Business Part 2: The Power of Imaging

Even though the digital-imaging process has completely revolutionized the notion of the paperless office, many businesses still have outdated workflows, capturing a paper document when it nears the end of its lifespan. While such a document-management process does cut down on the storage issues that surround paper documents, it also skips a significant part of the power of document imaging.

Let's take a look a how a truly modern document-management oriented workflow would treat this paper. It's accomplished by converting and processing the paper documents in a three-step process: scanning, tagging, and linking.

Scanning :
When a paper document arrives at a paperless business, it's visually examined to make sure that it makes sense - specifically, that someone who has never seen it or the people related to it will be able to determine what it's for and how to handle it. Once verified, it gets scanned, and document-management software automatically determines what kind of document it is and organizes it in a database.

Tagging :
As documents are saved to the database, a second round of employees takes over processing and tags each one, much like you would tag a picture on Facebook or Flickr. They add small notations electronically to each document that refer to various relevant items. At the very minimum, a customer identifier is added so anyone looking up that customer will find that document. Tags are often added describing dates, employees that processed the document, and projects or departments that the document is relevant to. The more complex and detailed the tagging process, the more easily the document will be found in the future.

Linking :
Finally, each document is linked to a specific transaction. A transaction, in this case, is an electronic packet that serves only to form a group of related documents, such as an order form, receipt, shipping invoice, and proof-of-delivery that all relate to the same sale. Linking provides the final audit trail to establish the validity of a given document and/or transaction.
Because of the tagging and linking processes, an image file has an incredible amount of power, far beyond what a document could ever have. Unlike the physically-limited nature of a paper-filing system, a single image can be parsed into dozens of different searchable groups by tag, so that looking up "every invoice between September and October '09" is less a matter of searching through dozens or hundreds of customer files for the relevant invoices and more a matter of putting a couple of tags into a document management program and waiting less than a second. In this way, document management software increases the efficiency of paperless offices at the same time that it saves storage space and paper costs.


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