A recent press release from Konica Minolta SA (South Africa) prompted me to further explain why structured scanning is a must when scanning paper based documents. I would have to say that 90 percent of all SMB’s are scanning the “old fashioned” way with MFPs.
What is the old-fashioned way?
“Old-fashioned” scanning is scanning back to one’s e-mail address, scanning to a desktop folder, scanning back to “your” folder on a shared drive, and even scanning to a USB thumb drive. I’ve even seen a few clients that are using a TWAIN driver to pull documents into their business line of software.
It’s only a matter of time before those scanned documents will be opened, renamed, and moved to another location one a time. What an incredible amount of wasted time, right? In addition, scanned files can still be moved to the wrong folder, and deleted.
What is structured scanning?
To be honest, I didn’t think I would have to think about how to explain this.
Once the documents are entered in the scanner, our user would then press our “scanning” key or button (soft touch or hard key); once the scanner button is engaged the user would then see “meta data fields” on the copier display. One of these fields might ask you for a case number, the other a purchase order number, or another could be the name of account, an address, a ZIP code-more or less some type of identifier for the document that is about to be scanned.
The user must then enter the information required in the meta data field before the document can be scanned. Hence we are giving structure to the method of scanning. Every scan has a job number, an account number, a ZIP code, an address, etc.
Structured scanning saves time and reduces errors that occur in the manual process of scanning each document one at a time.
How can we accomplish structured scanning?
Structured scanning can be accomplished by adding third-party capture software to the MFP. Most of these capture programs will need to be loaded on a server and on the MFP. Some of those products include Nuance Autostore, eCopy, and CCscan.
In addition, once these documents are captured and processed they can be easily routed to pre-defined workflows.
Costing
Depending on how deep you want to go with “structured scanning” the cost can start for as little as $30 per month. That’s well worth the investment since I see many accounts spending one or more hours a day scanning, naming, and moving documents the “old-fashioned” way.
Good selling!
