Importance of scanning in document management

Not all organizations have implemented document management. Only recently organizations are looking forward to document management knowing the effect of document management on the overall efficiency of the organization. There might be organization where there are piles of paper files and documents dumped over the years. They would have dumped them in a file room. In those documents not all are necessary to be retained.

Consider the case where you need to retain all those paper documents and that they might be referred in the future for some purpose. It is going to be a tedious task to find out the correct document you want in that pile of papers. It is for this reason there is a need to go for document management where all these paper documents are converted to digital form and stored in the document management system. The scanner is an important component of such a document management system.

 

Without the scanner you cannot convert the paper documents into digital form. The scanner converts all the paper documents into images. These images are stored in the database. An OCR software is also used to extract text content from the images created by the scanner. This text content is also stored against the image.

 

The purpose of extracting text is to use it in the search module. When you are searching for a document containing a particular text, the search module searches this extracted text and then find the mapping image of the paper document and displays it for you. Hence the scanner and the OCR software play an important role in document management.

 

When you look for a document management system, make sure the OCR software and the scanner are bundled in the offer. However, even they are not bundled there is a need to buy them separately and integrate it with the document management system. This is necessary to convert the existing documents into digital form. Automatic feeding of paper documents in the scanner is available as a feature in some of the scanners. You can look for such scanners.