Best practices to digitize your paper archives
4 steps to digitize your paper archives
Most companies today have to deal with an overflow of archives and cabinets, full of paper documents. Besides the important space taken which could be used in a more useful way (as a meeting room for example), this generates problems related to the search and consultation of information. Indeed, finding a paper invoice or contract can take up to 30 minutes for an employee.
Let’s see together the essential steps to digitize your paper archives securely and simply!
1. Settle the key points of the project
The objective is not necessarily to digitize everything at once. First, you may select the priority documents for this digitization project according to your company’s activity.
To do this, you will primo need to bring together all the people involved in the project, by scheduling a meeting to fix together the key points of the project and especially which elements will be precisely targeted. It will also be necessary to think about:
- The age of the documents concerned, from what year should the documents be digitized?
- The types of documents to be taken into account. Which ones require regular access? (Customers, employees, suppliers, …)
- Should the above categories be subdivided? For example, should all customer documents be digitized, or only invoices or contracts?
- In which format should they be scanned? The PDF format is the universal and generally recommended format.
- Who will do the scanning? Is it a trainee within your company, or a subcontractor, …?
- Once the documents are digitized, what about the paper archives? Since the goal is to save space, it would be wise to analyze which documents should be destroyed, which should be stored, and all this at a lower cost via an external partner for instance.
2. Putting the right tools in place: scanning equipment
Today, MFPs and scanners are excellent supports for digitizing documents in bulk in PDF format. However, depending on the audit previously carried out and the volume of documents, it is important to define which equipment is best suited to the project.
You should also read:
Digital archiving: Why go paperless?
Catalogue: Digital Content Service Plaform
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3. Indexing for better retrieval
In a digitization project, it is essential to associate metadata/tags or documents to help classification and subsequent research. It is therefore important to think beforehand about these elements which will allow the identification of the documents to be archived, and which will be used for the construction of a structured tree along with a logical renaming process.
On this particular point, you must be aware that the more precise you want the classification to be, the longer and more tedious the indexing time will be. There are document capture and recognition technologies that can simplify the task:
- One of the most common methods is to affix a barcode to the first page of a batch of documents, containing the year and name (of the employee or client, for example). The scanning technology then allows to process a large volume of documents and to classify them in a structured way by batch according to the value attributed to the barcode.
- The second method involves an intelligent data capture tool, which will allow going further regarding the recognition of key information (type and date of the document, etc…). It should not be forgotten that it is the OCS engine that allows capturing a set of words in each document that will be used later for a subsequent search.
4. Keep the company’s memory in a secure way
- As a real lung of the document system, the electronic document management will allow to store, on server or Cloud, all the documents according to the defined and implemented classification plan.
- Security rules allow you to define access rights for people authorized to access the information. On this subject, there is also the electronic safe box which will guarantee ultra-security where only the owner of the safe box can access.
- The integrated search engine will also be beneficial for you to find in a few seconds the information previously stored/indexed whether you are in the office, on the go, or working from home.
To conclude, today, in 2022, there are various solutions to get rid of these papers and archives problems and thus save space and time while securing access to documents and guaranteeing the confidentiality of your data.