The short answer is scan the active stuff and store inactive records.  

Scanning allows for easy sharing and manipulation of documents.  Collating, stapling, filing, pulling records and interoffice mail are completely eliminated when records are scanned.  Additionally, documents are easily shared after they are scanned, so, organizations with several locations can improve efficiency considerably with scanning and EDM. 

Records that are very active and require a great deal of handling offer the quickest return on investment for scanning.  

Studies we have done with our customers show that to pay a bill in the typical accounts payable process costs $8 - $12.  Filing, collating, various invoice and purchase order approvals, copying and other tasks drive this cost up.  Scanning can reduce this cost to less than $2.    We find that companies often cannot claim prepayment discounts with vendors because their accounts payable processes is simply too slow to make the 1% net 10 or 15 deadline.  One food wholesaler we helped institute scanning saved over $2,000/month in prepayment discounts alone.

Records that are scanned require no filing. (Duh)  One wholesaler and leaser of industrial equipment we help, (if you’d like to talk to them about us, call me and I’ll put you in touch with them) creates about 4,000 work orders or sales tickets per day, each of which is proof of a sale and a lease agreement.  It used to take an army of clerks to file each of these orders.  Now the records are scanned or imaged.  They are also indexed (tagged with keyword search terms) with transaction number, date, customer name, etc. so they can be located easily.  This process is saving the customer over $7000 per month.

To sum up, if there is a great deal of sharing records, if it takes more than 1 or 2 people to complete a record (payment approvals is a good example), if there is a lot of filing, or pulling records, consider imaging/scanning your records.

When deciding whether/how/when to drive your office towards a “less paper” state, you’ll need to be looking at Electronic Document Management, or EDM.  We often hear the acronyms EDM, ECM, ERM,  EMR and others, but electronic document management (EDM) is probably what the medium sized business needs to get familiar with and move towards when looking for efficiency in records management. 

EDM is the management of digital documents.  These documents can be images, audio, video or other formats.  Remember, anything that represents permanent evidence of, or information about past events is a record.  Because these digital files are records, we have to manage them just like we manage our papers. 

EDM software suites help us manage these records.  All of the chores we did with our paper records can be done by EDM software.   These old filing and records tasks we used to do with manila folders are done electronically now and often have new or different names.

Old Name                            What was/is it?                                                                             New name

Printing                             Creating the document for filing or use                                         Capture

Labeling                            Labeling the record to ease filing and retrieval                            Indexing

Pulling/Retrieval               Searching for a file in a cabinet or on a shelf                               Querying

Filing Order                       The way records were filed.  Alpha, Num, T                                 N/A

Most of the other tasks and terms are called by the same names in EDM; retention, destruction, chain of custody, record series and more are pretty much the same. 

The point of EDM software is that it can automate many of the labor intensive tasks involved in records keeping.  Capture, indexing, filling, retention scheduling, interoffice mail, destruction and more can be scheduled and scripted tasks done for you through the magic of computers.  Now the management of a record from birth through to destruction can be automated and done electronically.

I have talked to and helped hundreds of customers wrestle with this question.  Paperless, or less paper?  Over the next few days and weeks, we'll discuss the important factors that must be considered when deciding how to approach your records management problems.  We can't just  spend money willy nilly and force users to adopt systems they don't understand or trust.  We have to spend records management dollars wisely.  We have to roll out programs that users trust and use reliably.  

Feel free to send in the questions you face in records management.  Whether it's about EDM, scanning, hardcopy archiving, taxonomies or file folders, we'll be discussing it here, on the datastorageinc.com blog.