Working with diverse business organizations for more than twelve years, we have often come across a common anguish of our clients – the case of missing and wayward files. That too, at times when they are most needed! The main issue is the amount of valuable time lost in searching for the file. Buried or missing documents can be a real hindrance to business productivity. A missing document pulls you away from your core tasks, often taking you on a futile hunt which may result in further loss of time and lack of focus on core functions. This is not all; a permanently lost or missing document can also invite client dissatisfaction and bad reputation for your company. Maybe you have paper files; or maybe you have scanned and digitized your paper assets with the support of a document conversion company. No doubt, document scanning and digitization enables efficient streamlining and easy access to important data, and this process is best performed by a professional document scanning service that has an experienced team and state-of-the-art technology to provide customized solutions.
However, whether paper or digital, files may go missing in the absence of efficient document management. Your business documents need to be classified / categorized in an orderly manner in keeping with their apparent functional relationships. For instance, in an organization the engineering, sales, accounting and production departments may be involved in the processing of a customer order. In such instances, you may have silos of data or diverse data sets located in different locations/applications. At some time or other, you may need data from these various sites to address some issue. To enable easy access to such data, organizations need data warehouses or reliable business intelligence applications. While transaction data or customer related data can be collected into this warehouse and analyzed, digital documents that are electronically created or scanned are not always part of a data warehouse. In such cases, scanned documents also need a warehouse so that the information contained in them can be shared with other applications when the need arises.
Now, on another note let us just consider the main consequences of a lost or misplaced document.
- When an important document is lost, you may be forced to perform an action or make a decision with insufficient information. This may have a negative impact.
- Then there is the cost involved in trying to locate the document. Multiple employees may be involved in the search. Taking into account the number of people involved and the man hours lost the cost can be considerable.
What you need is a digital documentation system that can index the text of each and every document, whatever format it may be in. This will improve the chances of recovering a lost or missing document without incurring heavy costs.
