How to deal with a pile of paper & extract its valuable data.
06 June 2023
For years, the call to document management has led with the ideal of the paperless office. For many there is not just the current incoming content to consider but potentially a large legacy of paper sat in boxes.
Whilst these old records may simply be seen as historical, potentially needed to resolve queries or meet compliance, in reality there is a wealth of information (data) that could be analysed to contribute to future marketing and even further sales.The hidden cost of physical storage
Before we delve into the data itself, it is worth considering the cost of that physical content storage. It may well be that your boxes are tucked away on a dusty mezzanine in your office, seemingly costing you nothing – that is until someone needs to find a particular piece of paper.
Estimates place the average time spent locating a physical document at around 18 minutes, others quote an average cost of £15. (We’ll ignore the risk of employee injury claims from either moving or tripping over the storage!) Many companies pay for offsite storage with an upfront fee to initially store, a monthly retainer and then an access or retrieval fee should it be needed. A cost, quietly sapping at your bottom line and keeping valuable data from being utilised to improve your services.
There is of course the real risk of loss (through fire for example) with physical documents which could result in fines later down the road (if that loss contributes to a compliance failure).
By simply moving documents from physical to digital in a document management system, you instantly remove the overheads of searching for a document – a matter of seconds to locate and share (if required). This one simple step will also secure your documents against loss, theft, compliance failure, unnecessary physical duplication (photocopy) and will also allow you to manage those records to meet regional legislation with ease.
The lost data opportunity
In much the same way that a marketing consultant will tell you contacts in your CRM are “a pile of cash waiting to happen”, the content of those boxed, hidden documents has in itself the potential to unlock direct revenue or improve customer service. Depending on how documents were generated and the associated record keeping (potentially in disparate systems) for those documents, the content on each of those pages may well be the only true record of who, what, when, where and why.
If you could distil that knowledge onto one platform, with every aspect of the content searchable as a keyword, almost instantly, would that data not help…
…inform the future?
…shape how and when you communicate with existing customers for repeat orders?
…trace users of older products that need replacement or even a late recall?
…show those customers who no longer use your products or services and attempt to re-engage?
Transformation is as easy as 1 2 3
First you will need a document management system and an import configuration that uses OCR (optical character recognition) alongside traditional index criteria.
What does that mean?
As each image / page of content / file passes through the import stage, the OCR process analyses and stores a fully searchable database of all recognised characters against the other more traditional indexes such as date stored, document type, department etc. With OCR in place, there is the potential to locate a keyword from across your entire content repository – customer name, product code, total cost of sale…
OCR can also be combined with fixed index requirements to automate the primary and secondary index values the content is stored against initially – no one needs to actually go through and manually index these documents as the process of import and storage can be fully automated.
Secondly the older / backlog of content needs to get into the document management system and potentially (as paper) this would be through a workgroup or department grade scanner, capable of processing 100s of images a minute at the required resolution and quality.
You may not need a scanner going forward (all current content could be captured directly from email or file feeds) so either a short term loan of a departmental scanning device could be arranged (for the archive project duration) or the content can be sent to a third party data capture specialist who will return the content via download / portable storage to be imported. That same scan service may also offer secure destruction once the digital upload process has completed. Whichever option, the time to transform the data is relatively insignificant.
Finally, once the pages have been ingested and OCR has finished processing, all that remains is to start searching your data, perhaps with the help of a few defined searches but that is it. The digital transformation of your archive is complete.
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