Document Scanning Solution Ideas

[rosco]

Our office generates lots of documents. Purchase orders, receipts, repair orders, etc.

We are starting to look at needing a scanning solution to manage it all. Too much time is wasted retrieving old documents from storage etc.

What would you guys recommend for this? We would probably have an employee or two who as part of their job would scan these files in as they are generated. Then, we would like to be able to have them accessible to the different departments as needed.

What would you recommend for something like this?

When we looked at this a couple years ago, one of our vendors said they could do this and their solution included the scanning program doing some OCR which resulted in populating data automatically that you could search by: customer name, customer number, invoice number, etc. That vendor is not one we want to use though as they have fallen out of favor. That is the kind of functionality we are looking at having though.

 

[Nanan]

I looked into this for my company and honestly it is going to be expensive, way more expensive than you even realize if you want OCR and such and don't forget this is going to require a ton of HD space on the server, we were quoted at around 8tb for the 30 something filing cabinets we have of old job history oh yea that would have cost us about $200k and taken anywhere from 1-3 months of zero access to the files as damn near every service that does this takes the files off site.

Honestly I would suggest just dumping anything you are not legally obligated to keep as most of that history will be useless to you after a few years anyway.

 

[rosco]

I figured the ocr piece will be expensive.

So, as a next best solution I'm wondering if we could implement a system where the person keys in say 3 fields that we can search by. Like the customer name, customer number, and invoice number so we can then search by those later.

I'm thinking they would probably look them up in our existing system then copy/paste into the scanning system to eliminate typos.

 

[MikeTrike]

Take a look at Globodox.

 

[KarmaPoliceSTL]

I designed a system to do similar to this for engineering drawings... we used http://www.abbyy.com/ with a lot of success, they even have an enterprise solution which kind of handles it all as a workflow which you could have your one-three people participate in... If your documents are fairly well structured (in terms of the form itself being consistent) then the templating in this software would be invaluable to you... unfortunately our documents were of a LOT of different formats, so it was hard to create templates, thus we have 5 people working on the project, their job is to select the appropriate text areas for scanning, run it through the scanner process, and then Q/A the results... we get about 3 pages per minute through the process, which isn't too shabby i think.

 

[cyclone3d]

Our old setup was this:

1.Scan the documents to PDF.
2.Name the scanned files according to the naming standards we have.
2.Put the files in the correct location on the server according to the standards we have.
3.Use an Excel file that you enter the required information into, and it auto populates the links to the files.

We have a few different Excel files that are setup to do this for different document types. It took a few revisions of the Excel files to get them tweaked to work just right, but they are super easy to use and don't give us any trouble.

This is probably the cheapest way to do it, and it easily searchable.

As for the newer document stuff, it is going to be expensive if you go with an outside company.

Also, most bigger copiers and scanners have built in OCR, and/or come with software that creates searchable PDFs, but you will still need a way to organize and name the files so they are very easily found.