Author: Laura Bulmer
Organisations opting to move away from paper in favour of digital documents will require a high quality business scanner. Scanning documents and saving files digitally means they are stored with uniformity and available from any location saving time and money.
High quality scanners ensure data is captured accurately and efficiently and when integrated with document management software, it cannot be lost or misplaced.
Departmental scanners for businesses differ greatly from those used by individuals in the home as they can cope with high volumes of documents passing through them at speed. Batches of documents can be left to scan and do not have to be individually fed through.
Highly accurate and clear to read data is collected from every scan. This information can be archived by the business or used to kick start a number of business processes such as automated invoice processing, purchase order processing or contract management.
If staff are using your MFD to scan, you might want to consider the risks around data security, the time they spend wandering around the office and also the time spent manually organising and feeding scans into the device which is a printer rather than a scan solution. A departmental scanner reduces the time spent prepping and feeding the documents into the device.
Read here how you can transform your business with digital archiving.
The main problems with using your MFD for scanning is that they often provide poor quality images. This coupled with the time it takes to batch scan and the costly errors associated with poor scans, means businesses can be put off scanning all together.
A scanned image should be as legible as the original. It should not be skewed, have information missing and all images should be clear.
Another other obvious issue is what happens to the paper once it has been scanned? Organisations are often spending large sums of money each month to store the original paper documents as a backup as they are not confident in the scan quality.
In our opinion this is money that could be better spent elsewhere.
DocTech have provided departmental scanners for over 30 years to organisations ranging in size and industry across the UK.
We partner with Kodak Alaris as we believe they provide the best document scanners on the market alongside the best customer service for our clients. Due to the high number of scanning solutions we provide each year, DocTech have been named as an Elite partner of Kodak Alaris, a partnership we’re extremely proud of.
Organisations that handle high volumes of paper documents need to quickly and accurately convert them into high-quality images the business can use. The longer this takes the more cost to the business there is.
But when looking into departmental scanners, where do you start when considering the right scanning solution?
There are a wide variety of business scanners on the market and after an initial search the choice can seem a little overwhelming.
Our client’s requirements range from needing images of historical artefacts to be scanned into their digital archive to a food manufacturer that needs to accurately and efficiently capture all product specifications.
The right scanning solution will make all the difference to improving business processes and enables employees to work smarter. Here we describe in more detail the main business scanners used by our clients.
If there is a need to scan multiple documents, files or pages in one single session, your organisation will benefit from using a sheet fed scanner.
They are very popular in finance departments due to the high volume of incoming invoices, purchase orders and delivery notes received.
These departmental scanners allow users to quickly make digital copies of paperwork and manipulate them through computer software to be used for core business processes.
Sheetfed scanners can utilise gravity and a have a feeder accessory enabling multiple page documents to be fed into the scanner in a single go. Depending on the requirement, they can be compiled into a single finalised document or kept as separate documents.
Scanning speeds of sheetfed scanners are comparably much quicker than flatbed scanners making them one of the most efficient pieces of office equipment for handling high volumes of documents.
You can read more about the different options available to you on the scanning page of our website.
Once documents are scanned a key consideration is what’s next? Where will the images go and where will they be stored?
For many, scanning is the first step on a digital journey, working towards a paperless office environment as a part of a bigger digital transformation strategy.
Many of our clients want to capture a great quality image where the document itself or the data from it will be used in business processes, such as invoice processing or contract management.
For this reason, their scanners are integrated with our document management software to not only securely store the captured information, but to kick start an automated document workflow.
Read here how implementing document management software can reduce the risk of invoice fraud.
Whether that’s when an employee on-boarding form is stored and a task is created for IT to order hardware, or a delivery note arrives and is matched with an invoice to trigger payment.
Whatever the requirement is for using business scanners, the quality of the image is critical to ensure accurate information is captured and efficiently used by the business.
If you want to learn more about departmental scanners or how you can do more with the images you've scanned, contact one of the team at DocTech to discuss it further.
