Problem Solving Made Easy

Managing your documentary or paper assets is critical for any business, legislation demands that we retain more and more documentation. In todays world of teleworking and distributed work forces, sharinga and accesing physical datacan often be in conflict with your legal obligations in relation to the protection and control of that data.

Many organisations simply do not include their paper based data assets in their data management policies and procedures. You need to consider the whole lifecycle:-

• How the document is created
• What information does it contain
• Who needs shared access to that data
• Do you really need access to that phyical copy
• How long do you need to retain that data for?

Integerating these paper based systems can not only improve workforce productivity it can help manage your compliance posture as an organisation, introducing access controls that can be enforced and audited. In addition, in this energy concious age it can potentially reduce your carbon footprint.

Consider this; Your organisation has to send out a medical survey, the completed forms need to be accessed by medical staff and the documents need to be securely collected and the data analysed.

Taking an integrated approach would involve the returned forms being delivered to a central delivery point where the post in opened and then scanned electronically. The forms are all standard and the image of the form is stored along with its meta data extracted from the completed forms themselves using OCR. The digital image of the form and the associated meta data is then stored in a document management system. This system only allows authorised personell to see the forms and the data. The hard copies are then stored locally, for example if your delivery point is based in London then using document storage in London will reduce the amount of CO2 consumed transporting the scanned forms. In addition, access to the data is now digital and therefore we reduce the time energy and resources seraching for relevant data. This has to be ballanced with the CO2 cost of scanning and storing the electronic versions and the primary variable is access.

You can’t expect crops to grow without rain or sun, so you can’t expect work to be done well without the right measures taken. Document solutions cover all the main aspects of what runs your business and attempts to provide you with the most efficient and productive way of doing so. The world is changing and modern methods are applied to every type of business and organisation, computers are of course at the forefront of what we call the information age. Almost everything is done through computers, but if you find that that isn’t the case in your office then that is something that needs addressing via document solutions.

Having hard data scanned and put on computers is just the start of making everybody’s lives easier, accessing information on a computer opposed to by hand is much quicker for example. Perhaps there are procedures where information is written down, then why not set up a computer file for this purpose instead? Document solutions are there to make things that much easier allowing business to reach their maximum potential.