If you're a document imaging service supplier, you have to find ways to keep your costs low to offer competitive prices to your customers. On the other hand, if you're a consumer of document imaging services, you shop around for the best document imaging prices, and look for the optimum mix of imaging and incidental services that minimize your costs while meeting your needs.
Let us look at the specific factors that affect document imaging pricing.
The Quality of Document Imaging Services
Document imaging involves scanning original paper documents and converting them into scanned images. These images can be of varying quality depending on the type and quality of the original documents. To produce uniformly high-quality documents when original documents are of varying quality, the operators need to adjust scanning parameters expertly to suit the particular paper document.
Such individual attention to each document is a labor-intensive process that increases the cost of document imaging, and pricing. The cost is further increased by the need to employ skilled persons able to adjust the scanning parameters correctly to suit each document.
Document imaging involves not only scanning, but also optical character recognition or OCR. OCR converts the text in the scanned images into computer-readable text. When the original documents contain handwritten characters, or foreign-language characters, the OCR process might produce unreliable results. You then need higher-cost OCR software to produce acceptable results in such cases.
OCR results can be in different formats, such as ASCII text, rich text, etc. Again, you will need to pay more for software that can handle such varied formats.
The Range of Services Required
In practice, document imaging consists of more than scanning and OCR. Several other incidental services are typically required to deliver satisfactory results. The following are some examples of such incidental services:
Handling multipage, stapled, or bound documents involve removing the staples or bindings, scanning each sheet (single side or both sides), ordering the scanned pages and originals into the original sequence, and stapling or binding them again
Handling the submission of documents from different departments and persons, keeping track of each customer, and delivering the scanned results in agreed-upon formats such as PDF or XML on CDs
Document imaging costs and prices will vary with the range of services involved, whether you do these in-house or outsource them to external service providers.
Costs of Equipment
You can go for a simple desktop scanner that handles A4 size sheets individually or a complete workstation that includes an industrial scanner with automatic sheet feeding, OCR, sorting, and collating. The workstation will definitely be far more expensive, and can be justified only if there is a heavy volume of document imaging work.
OCR software will also vary in costs depending on its reliability while handing different kinds of original characters and also on the variety of character formats it can deal with.
Document imaging pricing is thus a highly variable element depending on the kinds of factors illustrated above.
Document Imaging And Management
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.
Manuel J. Montesino has sinced written about articles on various topics from Software, Computers and The Internet and Software. About Author:Ademero, Inc. develops document archiving software. Visit their website devoted to . Browse. Manuel J. Montesino's top article generates over 49500 views. to your Favourites.
