Modern businesses are taking advantage of digital technologies to improve operations, enhance customer satisfaction, and boost revenue. To achieve their digitization goals and adapt to the digital environment around them, organizations require the right support – talent, organizational structure, culture and leadership. The digital age requires converting all data into digital formats. So, the first step towards applying digital technologies to improve business processes is scanning documents to convert them into electronic files. Document scanning companies support the digital transformation processes by helping businesses convert large volumes of analog data into digital format.
How Data Conversion Backs Digital Transformation
The four pillars of digital transformation, according a Harvard Business Review article are IT uplift, digitizing operations, digital marketing, and digital businesses. Most companies need to tackle these processes as part of their digital transformation journey.
- IT upgrading – upgrading IT infrastructure, mobile infrastructure, data lakes, and the cloud
- Digitizing operations – using digital tools, including more advanced technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI), to optimize, simplify, and rationalize existing processes. This means mean replacing analog activities with digital ones.
- Digital marketing – using digital tools to interact with customers and market products/services. It involves capturing clean data, using digital tools including AI to understand customers, and engagement across multiple channels such as phone, email, and social media.
- Digital businesses/new ventures – this exploring and creating new business models, new products and services, and new sources of growth.
Document scanning and data conversion outsourcing support these four pillars of digital transformation by converting information stored in legacy formats into digital formats. In fact, the digitization journey begins when you move away from outdated processes and adopt more automated and data-oriented systems. By scanning paper documents and storing them in a centralized location, businesses can organize their important files. A good document management system will make digital documents easily accessible and save time and money by eliminating manual search.
Digital documents offer many benefits:
- Easy to store and retrieve and
- Easily and quickly accessible
- Easy to handle
- Easy to preserve
- Easy to update
- Easy to share
- Can be transferred using digital data transmission mode
- Optimize workflow
Digitized Documents Automate Data Mining and Strategic Decision Making
To stay relevant and competitive in the rapidly evolving digital world, businesses need information digital format to drive strategic decision making. Document scanning automates data mining by digitizing data. Data mining involves using statistics, AI and machine learning to find patterns, relationships and anomalies in large data sets. Data mining supports an organization’s business digital transformation journey in many ways:
- Provides the information needed for advanced analytics
- Drives smarter and more efficient decisions
- Provides insights to better understand process performance, causes of risk, and cost drivers
- Supports problem solving, trends prediction, risk mitigation, and finding new opportunities
Data mining is particularly relevant for digital marketing, one of the pillars of digital transformation. Data mining can help identify customers with different behaviors, optimize engagement by segment, and provide insights to help develop personalized ad campaigns.
Document Digitization – Take the First Step to Digital Transformation
Efficient document scanning services play a foundational role in all digital transformation initiatives. Experienced service providers use the latest technologies such as OCR to ensure best-in-class solutions and integrate everything from document scanning to document management:
- Accurate conversion of files into machine-readable format
- Reliable document digitization for multiple applications
- Conversion of paper documents to various digital formats – text, html, xml, pdf, doc, xls, giff, jpeg, tiff, etc
- Conversion of documents to searchable, retrievable and editable text files with OCR
- Digital records of all types of documents in any size including microfilm
- Uploading of converted documents to the document management system or other relevant platform
- Tagging and indexing digital documents to make them search-ready and accessible.
- Bulk document scanning
- Document conversion in quick turnaround time
- Security and stringent quality control
Experts will use specialized approaches to deliver the best results depending on the type of data and documents.
Digital transformation is a journey and takes time. Successful digital transformation depends on having a proper understanding of the current processes, their goals, and the problems that they solve. A good understanding of the current processes is essential to implement changes and improve them. Having the right leader, culture, talent, technology and other relevant resources for the journey can contribute greatly to success.
Digital transformation should be “preceded, accompanied or followed by other work that can complement it, such as strategic goal-setting, culture change initiatives and organizational design” says Forbes Councils Member Greg Kihlstrom. Document scanning services fall in the category of solutions that can transform and support an organization’s processes for the great digital transformation.
