There’s such a wide variety of equipment out there to capture your paper documents. I would recommend talking to a specialist with an understanding of all the Scanners on the Australian Market. It’s a question of balancing out whether or not to buy a high-volume scanner that will allow you to go and have excess capacity to start carving into your backlog or your accumulated files or to recommend the more cost effective option of outsourcing the backlog to a scanning bureau such as Microsystems and then equip yourself with something that is efficient for the daily, incoming volumes that are been received or internally generated.
What’s important I think from the vendor that’s providing you the equipment is that they have the ability to look at the entire market as far as the scanning equipment and software that gives you the most productivity gain. One of the benefits of Microsystems is we’re not tied to any particular supplier or brand. We are resellers for all scanner wholesalers within Australia, this means that we are then able to promote every document scanner available on the Australia market to our potential clients. Also, we have a wide range of both image capture, OCR or text recognition software and document management / workflow applications that we can promote to our clients relative to the specific needs they have.
It is important you’re talking to a company that can scope and scale the system that’s being deployed to incorporate more users within the company or indeed that it has the potential for growth organically as you go beyond a niche application such as board minutes or HR files to then encompass the entirety of the organisation’s physical records overtime.
One of the flow-on benefits of working with Microsystems about the introduction of an in-house scanning solution is that we have a record management focus; we can relate indexing protocols, scanner configuration, etc. The worst thing that you can have is the situation where you get three or four people that are entering information in your system and they’re all the same type of document, but because of the different vernacular or vocabularies that those four individuals have, you end up with truck, bus, lorry, pantech, where as it should all be, a vehicle, you need that consistent terminology, so that when you come to search for a document, you then have a situation where all staff can find it.
Because we have face-to-face relations with our clients, our records management emphasis where we’re teaching and training how to retrieve documents, how to think through the protocols and how you structure information so that you can at the back end retrieve it consistently as opposed to just leaving you to push documents through a scanner. The real benefit comes from finding a supplier that’s going to hold your hand a little bit even though you’re buying a scanner and doing it yourself.
The long term potential Microsystems offer is that if you fall behind a bit, our bureau service can get you back up to speed again,’ so you can then maintain your daily capture. It happens, people go on holidays, they’re enthusiastic to do it for three months and all of a sudden you’ve got the problem again, we come and fix that. It does happen fairly frequently because scanning document is a pretty mundane task, but the results you get, the productivity gains, the security aspect, all of the other things that flow through from having a digital record rather than the physical paper record.
Again it does come down to finding not just someone that’s selling you a box that you plug-in and attach to your computer. It’s someone that actually takes the time to walk you through the classification process. How we should be setting out the settings on the scanner to get optimal image quality and preventative maintenance routines that should be adhered to.
It’s important you get those incremental steps correct at the front-end because otherwise you’ve garbage in, garbage out and that’s the truth. If you can talk to someone with a record management emphasis rather than selling hardware and thanks very much for the sale pay the invoice and we’ll see you in three years when you need to upgrade the piece of equipment. Microsystems is consistently there. We are able to then come on board as required.