The first stage of document management is bringing the electronic and paper content that is created internally or received from outside into the organization's information system.
Electronic documents created within an organization usually sit in disarray on file servers. At the same time, large volumes of paper documents are used in communication with parties outside the company. Documents that arrive on paper, such as application forms, customer complaint letters, incoming faxes and invoices, need to be transferred into electronic form and routed into the workflow approval procedure.
Scanning is the first step in digitizing paper. A document transferred into electronic form gains enormous mobility. It can be shared across the organization many times faster than on paper. Electronic documents can also be identified according to various rules and brought into the system. Forms, emails and similar documents can be identified automatically and transferred into document management systems.
Scanning documents is not as easy as it looks. It requires good planning and the right solutions. It is not just a matter of connecting a scanner to your computer and saving the document as a PDF or TIFF. Do you need to scan documents centrally or in a distributed setup? What types of documents will you scan, and for what purpose? How will you index scanned documents so they can be easily found later? Your answers to all these questions will determine the features of the solutions you need.
Many organizations have started putting scanning projects at the top of their lists for the following reasons:
Higher customer service quality
Control and security of information
Lower distribution costs, such as courier and fax
Lower photocopying costs
Faster access to and sharing of information
Lower costs for archiving and organizing documents
Easier compliance with legal requirements
Scanning/Digitization
Digitizing a document is different from digitizing the data in the document. Digitizing a document means scanning it to create an electronic document in image format. Digitizing data means, for example, transferring the information on a form into electronic form as text.
Choosing a scanner
The type of document you will scan directly affects your choice of scanner. Photographs, color documents and colored documents call for slower, lower-volume scanners. Documents such as checks, invoices, contracts and forms call for high-volume, fast document scanners. If the documents are fragile historical documents, you need camera scanners that can scan without damaging them.
Your answers to questions such as the document size, whether it will be scanned in color or not, single-sided or double-sided, at what resolution, how many documents there are in total and how many need to be scanned each month also influence the choice of scanner. GGSoft helps you make the right investment in choosing a scanner with experienced service bureau consultants. With our scanner rental service, we reduce your scanning costs.
Scanning/digitization is done in 3 ways:
Transferring to electronic form using a scanner
Bringing electronic documents into the archive system
Converting existing electronic documents into an unalterable image format
Preparing the documents
This stage is very labor-intensive. Documents need to be prepared for scanning. Removing staples and paper clips, repairing torn pages, putting pages in order, removing sticky notes and taking documents out of binders all take a lot of time. Organizations often do not realize how long these tasks can take, so they fail to keep to the project schedule they planned. If documents are not properly prepared, scanning slows down considerably. With the service bureau offering we provide to our customers, all of these tasks are carried out by our experienced scanning consultants and scanning operators.
Scanners
Scanning is the conversion of a paper document into an electronic document.
Document scanning jobs require document scanners designed for this purpose. Today, MFPs (multifunction printers) can also do this. You can use these devices for low-volume scanning jobs.
Images of faxes received from a fax server can also be brought into the document management system. However, the quality of these images is low because of fax technology.
After documents are scanned, their image quality should always be checked by a second operator. Defective images should be flagged and rescanned.
Scanner categories
Scanners can be classified by speed. However, in service bureau work, actual scanning speed is far below the figure in the brochure. This should be kept in mind.
Workgroup, 10-20 pages/min
Department, scanning speed 20-50 pages/min
Archive, scanning speed 50-100 pages/min
Bulk archive, scanning speed 100+
Check scanners are high-speed scanners. They have MICR recognition features.
In addition, camera scanners are used for fragile documents and A0 plotter scanners for large-format documents.
Evaluating scanners by features
Feeder or flatbed: for high-speed scanning, the scanner must have an automatic document feeder. Photographs and fragile documents can be scanned with a flatbed scanner.
Resolution ranges from 100 dpi to 1600 dpi. However, high resolution greatly increases the disk space a file takes up. Transferring large files over the network also takes time. On the other hand, good resolution increases the success rate of OCR recognition. Using 300 dpi as the optimum scanning resolution is enough for good OCR recognition.
Color, black and white, grayscale: color files are usually not preferred because they are very large. They can be used, however, if images need to be captured. Black and white scanning is the most popular because it takes up little space. Grayscale is effective for reading graphics on pages.
Duplex scanning: this feature, which scans both sides of a page in a single pass, is a must.
Scanning capacity: the volume determines the capacity of the scanner to choose. Heavy scanning requires scanners with a high daily scanning capacity.
Consumables: the replacement intervals and prices of parts that need to be replaced over time, such as lamps and roller kits, are important in the selection. Being able to replace these parts without a service call should be a deciding factor.
Image enhancement
After documents are scanned, a number of enhancement operations are applied. Deskewing, removing noise, removing punch hole marks and handling blank pages reduce document size and improve quality.
Indexing
After scanning, documents must be tagged with keywords. By using these keywords as search criteria, you can instantly reach documents in the document management system. That is why indexing with the right keywords is so important.
Index fields are filled in by data entry operators (customer name, date, reference number, etc.).
With barcodes, index information is encoded in a barcode before bulk scanning, so index information is captured automatically from the barcode at the end of scanning. You do not need data entry operators.
Zonal OCR: if the quality of scanned documents is good, index information can be captured with OCR from specific areas of the document. This solution also enables automatic indexing.
Scanned documents can be stored in various formats:
TIFF is the industry standard and is widely used.
JPG is used especially for color documents because of its compression.
PDF is an industry standard. Once a PDF is processed and indexed, word-based searches can be run inside it.
GIF enables high-quality graphic files to be displayed and shared.
Form processing
The information on scanned forms is processed by ICR, OCR and OMR engines and converted into text data. This data can then be transferred to any application.
Recognition
OCR converts printed text into text data.
ICR converts handwritten characters into text data.
OMR reads marks such as checkboxes.
Barcode: reading the information encoded in it.
Transfer
Data and documents in electronic form can easily be transferred to any kind of system:
Workflow systems
ERP systems
Document management and archive systems
Disk storage systems and more
Sources
https://www.ibm.com/think/topics/optical-character-recognition
https://www.ibm.com/think/topics/document-processing
https://dergipark.org.tr/tr/pub/jist/article/714810
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