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Compliance

Federal regulations such as HIPAA, Sarbanes Oxley, Gramm Leach Bliley and FACTA mandate the protection and limited access to confidential files and documents. With digital records, you gain control and compliance of your information down to the page. The capability to track and audit who has looked at a document as well as and when is a strong argument to moving all your files to digital. However don’t let this be the overriding reason. A properly designed records management program with a qualified vendor that has the proper systems and procedures in place can also provide adequate protection for your documents at a more reasonable cost. First you need to ask yourself some questions and do a little research before deciding what if any documents should be scanned.

Question 1. Which documents should I consider digitizing?

Customer Support and Productivity

Typically the most mission critical/frequently accessed documents in support of customer service; litigation and accounting for example make sense to digitize. It comes down to “time” if digitizing documents:

• Increases staff productivity
• Betters customer service
• Reduces staff hours there is a strong argument to digitize those particular business documents.

If after documents are received/produced and they are rarely accessed they should be placed and managed by using conventional records management.

Identify Activity

To determine which should be digitized a simple evaluation of your Records Management Invoices can be done as a first step,  to determine which document types/departments are being requested the most often. If you see you are requesting particular file types often they should be considered for scanning, those that are very rarely requested back should go into conventional storage.

Workflow

If you have in house storage, having a designated employee take some time to observe office activity is a good start, followed by department meetings to ask the employees of your firm where they spend most of their time during the day and on what activities (such as copying/faxing documents for customer requests). Your staff are a great resource of information and knowledge.  Let them give you some insight and suggestions on the topic… you might be surprised by what you find.

Question 2. Should I Do Scanning in House or Use a Vendor?

Normally outsourcing scanning will be less expensive than doing it yourself and produces a better quality product when all costs are considered. Records Centers, for example, have better software to produce superior image quality on faster commercial scanners with commercial indexing software. Overhead costs and staff productivity associated with scanning your own documents are usually not taken into account when an organization determines it’s cheaper to do it in house. In addition, the scanner throughput you see in the scanner literature is based on clean documents that are all the same size and does not take into account the time needed to name a file and to load and unload a scanner for the next batch of documents. A scanner rated at 60 pages a minute in all practicality only gets about 15-20 pages a minute on an 8 hour shift with a good trained operator and does not include indexing time. Overhead costs and productivity issues affect the bottom line and do cost organizations real money.

These overhead costs may include but are not limited to:

• Space for scanning equipment
• Scanner throughput limitations
• Space and staff time for document prepping
• The scanner(s) themselves and maintenance
• Software and annual support fees for the image capture software
• Training of new staff
• Indexing of Documents
• Cost to host and retrieval software
• Cost of proper back-up of imaged documents
• Security and compliance software costs
• Lost staff productivity switching between activities
• Additional internet bandwidth if you host images in-house
• Additional servers and IT staff to maintain them (images take up allot of space)

 So the questions to ask yourself are:

• What is our core business and what generates income?
• Do we want to take on another responsibility that may distract us from that business?
• Do I really want my staff doing scanning when they could be performing more important activities that grow and support the business directly and generate income?

Only after this type of review can you develop an educated and cost effective approach to imaging and identify how digital solutions fit the specific needs of your firm.

InfoStore Records Management

www.infostorerm.com
201-806-2380