We are living in the information age; information comes in many different forms, from old fashioned letters to emails, audio and video material, and digital documents of all kinds. Businesses revolve around a mass of information that never ceases to grow. New clients require new contracts and official documentation. Your staff need to communicate with each other and the outside world. Your marketing department needs to develop new ways to attract new customers. All of this work requires the use and storage of information.
Of course, the traditional way to store information was in filing cabinets, on shelves and perhaps in boxes. The larger the business, the more storage space was needed. Physical documents continue to constitute a major part of business life, but the volume of it has dramatically decreased. Contracts, for example, are often still printed and signed by hand, but day to day personal communication has shifted in a major way to email and telephone.
You can explore several document management solutions in order to ensure that the information you need is kept securely and efficiently. Whether information is digital or not, its storage is of major importance to any business. A long running client, for example, may suddenly ask for information that dates back several years. This needs to be retrieved at minimum cost and maximum speed. Although you can continue to store information in the traditional way, scanning and digitising it may be a better and ultimately cheaper method.
Both your hard copy and digital documents can be stored in low risk, high security facilities. These are off-site, ensuring that your own office space is optimised for day-to-day work and minimising clutter or danger of overcrowding. Moreover, your staff can concentrate on the present; working on new projects and finding and retaining new clients, instead of searching through vast databases of largely irrelevant information for one document.
A digital archive creation can be low cost and highly efficient. One way is to scan all of your documents. However, this is rarely the most cost-effective method of storing digital information. A pay as you go model may work better. After all, you are not likely to need equal access to all of your archived information. Some information, indeed, can be stored for years without requiring consultation. The pay as you go model works by giving you digital access to the most frequently required documents. Other documents can then be scanned on demand. Intelligent scanning means that new information is scanned and digitised, paper documents are digitised and the digital information is stored with maximum security. All archived material is easily accessed by you as its owner, who retains full control.
There are different options. Archived documents can be scanned in bulk, or provided on demand. On demand scanning can be done on the same day. Optical Character Recognition text rendering, or OCR, means forms can be read automatically, often down to handwriting and barcodes. Access to digital information can be provided through a web portal for ease of use.
