In most cases, scanning is considered to be a straightforward process that requires a 'little' labour. On the contrary, it is the initial step of digitization of hard copy documents affecting the quality of the document lifecycle management as clustering of the documents is conducted at this stage.
Scanned documents shall be integrated into document lifecycle management with one of four options: naming scanned files, OCR/ICR, indexing, and form processing. Even simple file naming requires the documents to be clustered — the document types have to be defined before the scanned documents take their part in the cycle.
The clustering or classification step, a part of the analysis stage, with or without scanning is where wisdom has its most value. The flows of the company and the knowledge of the company are based on the document types composed. Consequently, it is not surprising to have the analysis stage performing the highest scores in time consumed statistics of the projects completed.
The Five Steps of Scanning
- Separation — the initial step where documents are prepared for high-speed scanning by ripping out staples, removing stickers or taking out documents from folders
- Scanning — scanning documents with high-speed professional scanners
- Indexing — the data entry step where data operators capable of typing 50,000 characters per day are used for fast indexing
- Control — the critical step of the entire process as the calibre of control directly affects the project delivery time. Quality of scanned documents and correctness of data entry is monitored
- Transfer — the last part involving transfer of documents with attributes to the document lifecycle application