Document Digitization: Necessary or Just an Option?

Popularity of digital document repositories is ever-expanding!!

Companies across the globe have been stressing document digitization over the years. Managing a business digitally is somewhat impossible, without a stable digital document management process.

Noway! We're not telling you that. The industry data is telling everything…

A report by XEROX shows "46% of employees in SMBs are struggling to find documents (digital and paper-based both) and end up wasting their productive hours." So, you can guess how much cost it is taking to bear up the wasted productive hours.

Is there any way to end this document-finding struggle?

Of course, YES. Through digitizing your documents, you can bring a flow into your documents and retrieve them whenever you need. Let's talk more about document management and digitization in this blog.

Digitizing documents simply means converting paper-based documents into digital sharable formats. Using optical character recognition (OCR) technology, you can scan, index, and store digital documents while converting them from physical documents. Now the main part, making the documents easily accessible and searchable is the core purpose of document digitization.

But wait, there're more…

We'll talk about the benefits of document digitization in the later part in detail. Let's here quickly understand how digitization works and how you can make it happen to your documents.

Digitizing a document is an easy but layered process. It involves multiple steps, to be precise. Here's the breakdown you can follow to digitize your documents.

Prepare your documents for the scanning. For this, you need to unstaple and sort them into the right order. Please ensure that your documents are in good condition, only if it will ensure the quality of the digital output.

Use a high-quality OCR scanning machine to create digital documents based on your physical documents. This technology helps scan the visual information from paper documents and convert it into a digital image, like a PDF or TIFF file.

After scanning, now it comes to extracting data from the scanned images to make the document searchable. The OCR technology itself does that. It converts images into machine-readable texts. So, it makes the document editable and searchable as well.

Organize the extracted document data in the predefined category in this step. Add metadata to your documents using keywords, which helps in finding the document. Not only this but when you put your document in the digital document repository, it will help you retrieve your data easily.

After you finish document digitization, now comes the critical task, which is storing and managing the documents. Here, you can hire an efficient team for the same or you can choose to outsource document management services for the better option.

That's all you need to do to convert your paper-based documents into digital outputs. Once you go through all the steps, you can enjoy your digital documents floating in and around your processes seamlessly. For sure, it will enhance productivity as well as improve the efficiency of your operations.

It's now time to spit out some hard facts about digitizing documents. You can have all the following benefits when you do it.

1. Save Space: No need to create spaces for your documents to store when you digitize them. All your documents will be stored securely in the Cloud without any physical appearance. Moreover, shifting to digital document management can also eliminate the costs of maintaining physical space.

2. Quick Retrieval: Get access to your documents at any time and anywhere when you store them digitally. So, any authorized person can have access to reach your documents. Plus, you can make your document centrally stored to ensure quick retrieval.

3. Make Document Secure: Documents in paper-based format can have many issues. They can lost, damaged, or even stolen. But not with digital documents, it can be protected via password or with any other strong security measures.

4. Enable Collaboration: Unlike physical documents, digital documents can be shared with many people in real-time. Plus, it weakens the geographical barriers as you can share your documents with anyone at any time irrespective of the location they are sitting.

5. Disaster-Proof: Document digitization is a disaster-proof plan. You can protect your documents from any fire incidents, floods, or any other natural disasters. Additionally, even when your staff does not reach the office you still have your documents in your control.

No doubt! Document digitization can immensely benefit you from many angles, but digiting your documents can be challenging, especially if you have;

Simply put, YES!

Outsourcing is a good option when you need document digitization. First, you'll have the right skill set where professionals will do the OCR work. Secondly, you can fit your data with all protective measures as the outsourcing agencies do follow all data protection laws. And lastly, outsourcing is cost-friendly and scalable, which promises to stay fit into your budget.