Why Has Document Imaging Become So Important? By Manuel J. Montesino At Isnare.com Ezine Articles

Document imaging involves converting paper documents into electronic images. These images need further processing to make them into true electronic documents. This is because any text in the image, while readable by humans, is not readable as text characters by computer systems.

Hence the images need further processing using technologies such as Optical Character Recognition - OCR - to make the text characters machine-readable.

This article explores why document imaging has become so important in today's business environment.

Significance of Document Imaging for Document and Record Management

In industries like healthcare and insurance, the volume of paper documents generated in the course of business is huge in volume. Much of these paper documents also need to be stored as records for business and compliance purposes.

The solution of earlier days, of sorting the paper documents, filing them in paper folders, and storing the folders in filing cabinets, would be highly impractical.

An army of filing clerks would be needed to sort, file, and store the paper documents. Many important documents are quite likely to be misfiled and become "untraceable". The filing room is likely to be a chaotic place with overflowing contents.

To retrieve a paper, people might have to pull out a number of files, go through many (or all) of them, and at the end, the document might not be found at all.

Many of the documents are likely to be in poor physical condition even originally. Stored in the above conditions, they are also likely to become completely illegible and useless.

It's in this context that document imaging becomes significant. Documents are scanned and processed with OCR immediately or soon after receipt. With today's advanced scanners and OCR technology, excellent images of even illegible paper documents can be obtained, and the data can be validated, formatted, and stored under relevant categories.

It then becomes possible for staff to access the documents without moving from their workstations. They can retrieve any electronic document in minutes from the system's central server, even if they were located in a distant office.

In an environment where the system reliably ensures that all paper documents are scanned and processed on receipt, staff can even shred the paper documents once they are done with it. Such shredding would save on the labor, space, and other costs of storing the paper documents in filing cabinets in a filing room.

This new environment would also provide employees far greater job satisfaction than the earlier one of low productivity routines and musty filing rooms.

Modern Equipment

Today's scanners can work with illegible, odd shaped, awkwardly inserted, physically damaged, and other kinds of paper documents and produce images that are better than the originals.

Then there is equipment to extract documents from envelopes, and scan and process the documents into machine-readable electronic content with minimal human intervention.

Document management software can handle these initial steps and go on to manage the entire lifecycle of the captured documents.

Conclusion

The huge volumes of paper documents generated by certain industries in today's businesses make it impracticable to handle them with the earlier filing cabinet and filing room solutions. Instead, document-imaging solutions allow scanning the paper documents, and processing the resultant images with character recognition technologies, to convert them into acceptable electronic documents. This solution also has the advantage of allowing staff to access the documents from their workstations, instead of having to go to a musty filing room and pull out a lot of dusty files and then try to locate a particular document that might have become fully illegible.

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