TECHNOLOGY
The CSR processes the mail and then puts it into a stack to be captured into the electronic filing system later. Most systems today use a “barcode coversheet” that is printed from the agency management system or document management system.
___________________________ To determine what works best for your agency, make sure to involve your employees in this process. ___________________________ To determine what works best for your agency, make sure to involve your employees in this process. Come up with a detailed written workflow that describes how every document that comes through your agency is to be processed. The workflow must clearly show each employee’s responsibility for processing each type of document. At this point, the only concern is who will be doing the scanning and where and when they will be doing it. The details of how it will be done will be determined later.
Step 2: Determine what will be captured Before deciding on what type of hardware and software to buy, you need to know how much paper you expect to scan every day and how many electronic documents you receive. Many agencies think they need to scan every document. Think this through carefully. If a document can be reproduced from an
agency management system or from another vendor system, then it doesn’t need to be printed and captured. The fewer documents you need to scan, the less expensive everything will be, both in terms of hardware and in terms of time users spend scanning. Again, involve your employees in this process. Try to get at least one person from each department who has a good understanding of what their department handles. Come up with an estimate on how many sheets of paper you will be scanning on a daily basis.
Step 3: Determine hardware needs Now we are ready to put the pieces together and get the equipment in place. We will need to determine the following things: File format: There are many file formats available for saving scanned images. PDF and TIF are the most common formats used for saving text documents. Adobe’s PDF format has become the preeminent standard for saving and exchanging electronic documents. PDF files are small in size, and they offer the ability to save both an exact image of the original document and editable (and searchable) text all in one file. For agency purposes, it is critical that the files retain their original appearance and are text searchable. File storage: Saving electronic documents on an existing network server will not impact
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the speed of the server significantly. It is just a question of drive space. If you do not have enough space on existing servers, then you can add a Network Attached Storage (NAS) server. A NAS server is simply a server specifically designed to add storage to a network. We recently purchased a 1 TB (1,000 Gigabytes) hard drive for under $100. Scanners: Now that you know what file format you want to use, scanner selection becomes fairly simple. You need a scanner that scans to PDF files and that can handle the volume of scans you need. Fujitsu scanners offer a full line of scanners that scan to PDF files at the push of a button and include Adobe Acrobat for handling the images after scanning. The important thing to look for is the “duty cycle” of the scanner. The duty cycle indicates how many pages per month the manufacturer has designed the scanner to handle. Try to match the duty cycle to the number of pages you will scan each month. A good entry level scanner for testing or light use is the Fujitsu ScanSnap, which retails for about $500.
Step 4: Software and procedures At this step you’ll need to make decisions about the following items, as well as define procedures for scanning, saving, finding and viewing the document you have captured: Software for saving images: Most scanners include software for