With our move date rapidly approaching, we are taking full advantage of the opportunity to do some organization, cleaning, and purging. Since we’ve been in our current building for nearly 20 years, like other businesses or households, we’ve accumulated a number of things that we just don’t need to take with us to the new building. In the spirit of always working to build and improve the Smart Office, we found that we had a fair amount of old files that were prime candidates for digitization. Let’s face it, it’s a lot easier to move a hard drive than a truck full of filing cabinets!
These particular files are customer order and contract packets that we access on a regular enough basis to keep them in air-conditioned office space, but since they’ve made it through their process, they are generally considered static documents. The packets numbered in the thousands, with the page count just shy of one hundred thousand. These and other factors allowed us to consider several digitization and storage options, taking into account both our short-term and long-term goals. After evaluation, we were able to select and implement a fast, simple, and cost effective solution that will meet our immediate needs and set us up for even more power storage solutions in the future.
We decided to utilize small, fast Panasonic desktop scanners to quickly digitize each packet as a pdf and save it to a shared and backed up drive on our server. Utilizing a couple of different employees, we were able to break up the work and scan and upload around 600 packets in just a week. Seeing the speed and success of this method, we pressed ahead quickly and at this rate, we will easily finish well before our move date. Not only is this effort helping to expedite our move, but it is also helping us save both money and time. Going paperless means we will not have to plan for large filing cabinets, saving square footage at our new facility. This also cuts down on costs needed to physically move these bulky cabinets to our new space. In addition, these digitized and backed-up files are now significantly hardened against risks ranging from simple misplacement or misfiling, all the way up to natural disasters like fire or flood. Finally, this will give all authorized employees immediate access to the files they need, right from their desktops.
While Advanced Office is utilizing scanners in preparation of a move, many departments heavy on documentation, like Accounting or Contracts, could highly benefit from the convenience and effectiveness of digital storage.
There are multiple ways to go digital, and just like when we craft a solution for a customer, we evaluated all options and picked the best fit for the requirements. For a more detailed breakdown of common options to convert paper files to digital documents, click here.
In the end, we are very happy with the method we chose, and we are confident it will not only make our move less expensive and easier, but it will also make our ongoing work faster and better.
