I recently read the current report* from AIIM entitled Document Scanning and Capture: local, central, outsource - what’s working best? There were some interesting revelations in here, worthy of several posts, but one in particular stood out to me.

Although 78% of those surveyed have some form of distributed scanning via MFPs [multi-function scanner/printers], desk top scanners or branch-office scanners “many managers still consider it to be a scan-to-archive application, rather than opening up to the possibilities of scan-to-process.”

This says to me that people are predominantly scanning documents to get rid of paper file cabinets and archives – they’re scanning documents that are already “dead.”

Unfortunately, the real value from document scanning comes from those documents that are very much “alive” and that require action. About 57% of respondents identified “improve process throughput (productivity)” as an important business driver for document capture.

Yet, in reality only 37% of survey respondents are scanning over half of their inbound documents. Of those scanned documents, 57% are passed to archive rather than a business process.

In other words far fewer than half the organizations doing scanning are using less than half of those documents to power their business processes, while more than half of them think that improving productivity is important. So where’s the disconnect?

Getting value out of these living documents requires a few elements, the lack of any of which could be causing the breakdown. These key elements are:

1. A document capture approach that is closely tied to the desired business process. Whether it is full OCR, barcode capture or selective field capture, there’s more value to be obtained from working backwards from a defined business process to capture only the information needed from the document than the alternative of capturing everything from the document and hoping you get the right fields for the business process.
2. A centralized document repository that accepts the scanned documents and can route them into a workflow that continues their journey toward completion of the business process while also maintaining a record of that journey — such as the approvals or actions required along the way.
3. An organizational culture that is committed to doing more than just saying they want improved productivity from their capture operations. The organizational needs to state what it expects to accomplish, appropriately train and reward employees for meeting paper processing goals and ensure the right technologies are in place throughout the process.

Finally, once the business value has been obtained from a living document, and it is appropriately stored in an electronic repository, organizations need to know when it’s time to say farewell to the paper original. AIIM found evidence that 1 in 4 users don’t trust the scanning process, so they photocopy the document before it is sent to be scanned! Now, with two copies floating around, it could be a long goodbye.

* The report referenced in this post is available for free from www.aiim.org/research

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