In this modern digital age, scanning has became the ideal tool to store large amounts of paper archives. Just imagine storing an entire archive room on a single HDD. Based on files size and file format, you can actually do that nowadays. So the question of why turns into how.
There is no real reason not to, rather than find out how to, and do it more effective. As most printers nowadays have a scanning function, this is a good way to start. If you want to start now, for most companies, handling and scanning the daily documents should not be difficult. Of course, if you want to scan your back archive, we suggest using a specialized service provider, like Overnight-scanning.eu. Also, your daily documents could provide tricky for you to scan them in house, not to mention the cost savings when outsourcing the service.
All in all, scanning has moved from a trend to a real necessity. The amount of documents one can process when it has digital copies of them, is actually very high, way higher than in cases when the documents are on paper. A good indexing method, reduces downtime caused by physical searching for documents. And please believe us, downtime can be used for better things than manipulating archival boxes and paper in general.
Another thing when it comes to scanning is actually the perception and customer expectation. Most customers, when they hear of scanning, they imediatelly think of having a word document from their physical paper. While this is possible, the real benefit of scanning is actually managing papers, having the ability to browse through forms, documents, contracts, at the click of a button, integrating them into new queries, or attaching them in order to answer different requests.
When you constantly need to browse through documents, or generate huge amounts of documents, the actual value of these documents is found in the way they are organized and structured. Physical structuring of documents is good, digital structuring is way better. It reduces downtime when searching, cancels the need for scanning as they are already scanned and eases attachments and facilitates the movement of these document scanning services.
As a conclusion, when you get to the point that your old documents still need constant attention, scanning handles this in a proper way. Just think, 3 different requests, 3 different folders, 3 different places in your archive. When your files are structured digitally, it will take 10 times less to find, browse and move these documents.