GREEN DOCUMENT STORAGE RESULTS IN A PAPERLESS OFFICE

 

Paper documents are often at the center of everything we do. Organizations of all sizes are tasked with managing heavy paper and electronic content processes and departments. Paper has long been a requirement to comply with government regulations, record legal transactions, maintain employee or customer records, and manage the operations of the organization.

 

Green document storage embraces the need for electronic documents, concentrating on reducing the long term need for paper documents in order to reduce an organization’s carbon footprint. Green document storage consists of:

 

• Digital imaging (scanning) of paper documents into either PDF or TIFF image formats
• Data entry of key information (abstracting) about the documents to aid information retrieval
• Highly secure, 24 hour access over the Internet with a web browser

 

Green document storage has matured into the best practice for bottom line cost savings and improved worker productivity. The greatest strength of green document storage is the improvement of access to records. When records need to be accessed frequently, or from remote locations, or simultaneously by multiple users, imaging is a cost effective means of distributing and rendering information.

 

ENVIRONMENTAL BENEFITS

 

By looking at the forest instead of the trees, green document storage delivers environmental benefits for the betterment of planet Earth.

 

Recycling

Many types of paper documents can be shredded for security requirements and then recycled into new paper products. This reduces paper waste in landfills and improves our ability to practice sound timber management.

 

Carbon Emissions

If you use a self-storage facility to store paper records, each trip in your automobile to retrieve documents increases carbon emissions. If you use a document storage company, each delivery also increases carbon emissions. With green document storage, documents are only a mouse click away.

 

Land Management

The paper storage management business has grown on average 20% annually for the past twenty years in the U.S. This growth has driven the need for hundreds of new storage facilities. While some of these facilities have successfully reused existing buildings and improved existing districts, many of these new facilities have used valuable land and building resources that may have been better utilized.

 

ORGANIZATIONAL BENEFITS

 

While traditional paper storage practices seem to be less expensive initially, the costs add up over time. According to PriceWaterhouseCoopers, “An average organization makes 19 copies of each document, spends $20 in labor to file each document, spends $120 in labor searching for each misfiled document, loses one out of every 20 documents and then spends 25 hours recreating each lost document.”

 

Some of the benefits of green document storage include:

 

• Improved productivity through rapid document retrieval
• Reclaim office space with up to 93% of office space reduction
• Efficient disaster recovery
• Increased document control and security
• Compliance with privacy and disclosure laws

 

WHO CAN BENEFIT?

 

Green document storage is applicable to any paper intensive organization, including:

 

• Legal
• Financial Services
• Healthcare
• Insurance
• Energy/Utilities
• Manufacturing
• Federal Government
• State & Local Government
• Higher Education
• K-12 School Districts
• Retail

 

Business processes that are traditionally paper intensive include:

 

• AP & Financials
• Human Resources
• Contract Management
• Compliance
• Claims
• Litigation
• Titles
• ISO 9000
• OSHA 1910

 

HOW DOES THIS SERVICE WORK?

 

Digital imaging, also referred to as scanning, is a process whereby a document is converted from print to a computer-readable format. You can think of the digitized version as a photocopy that can be viewed on your computer. Digital images produced by scanning are equivalent to the photographs one produces with digital cameras: they can be transmitted, displayed, and printed, but as images they are not text searchable. In order to make searchable electronic text, one must either transcribe records by typing and performing optical character recognition (OCR) processes upon digital images following scanning. The digital imaging process consists of:

 

Document arrangement: Prior to scanning, the client must decide upon units of organization for the digital copies. Will they mimic the arrangement of the original prints, or will they, for example, be separated from one source item into multiple documents? Document imaging is not always a one-to-one process.

 

Technical considerations: Decide on file formats and other technical requirements for scanning, storage, and retrieval.

 

Identification: Consider what information about the documents will need to captured to describe and organize the digital copies into records.

 

Document preparation: Physically clean up the documents, such as removing staples or paper clips, to prepare them for scanning.

 

Scanning: Most documents can be scanned with an auto feeder or light handling. Documents are typically scanned at 240 dots-per-inch (DPI).

Quality control: Images are inspected to ensure that they are of good enough quality for the purpose for which they are being scanned.

 

Disposition of source documents: Discard the paper once satisfied that the electronic records are accurate.

 

Storage and Access: Sfile ECM is a web-based solution for the management of electronic documents; delivering end-to-end lifecycle management of business critical documents. Sfile provides a robust, secure corporate knowledge library to manage documents that can be searched with unparalleled precision.

 

ACCESSING YOUR INFORMATION VIA SFILE

 

Answer an inquiry. Review records. Share information. At a moment's notice, the document you need is searchable and accessible. This is the power and simplicity of Sfile.

 

Users can quickly search for desired documents. A single click instantly displays the documents you need and places powerful viewing, annotation, organization, distribution and other tools at your fingertips. If desired, users can be allowed to print or download files to their local computer.

 

Sfile allows you to organize your documents within the repository according to your records management policy: by customer, by patient, by transaction, by product, etc. Users can easily bookmark documents with tags for rapid retrieval of common or important documents. The intuitive Sfile Idox viewer enables users to zoom, rotate, redact and annotate documents. As Sfile was designed to seamlessly manage both paper and electronic documents, users can upload their own word processing, spreadsheet and presentation files. The Sfile Idox viewer supports the most commonly used file types and displays them in TIFF and PDF format without any effort by the user.

 

SFILE GREEN DOCUMENT STORAGE CUSTOMERS

 

The following organizations are existing or past Sfile customers:

 

• Andrews Kurth
• Continental Carbon Company
• Evonik - Degussa
• Exec - U - Store
• Ferrell North America
• Fort Bend District
• Safety Watch
• San Jacinto River Authority
• Sequent Energy Management Group
• TSI

 

TAKE ACTION - GO GREEN WITH SFILE!

 

While Sfile is known for its innovative hosted software as a service technology to meet the most challenging enterprise content management and e-discovery needs of corporations world-wide, Sfile also has the muscle necessary to digitize and convert your paper documents within any budget and on-time. Sfile can help organizations of any size; from those that need 1,000 documents scanned per month to those who need millions scanned a week. Contact Sfile today to speak with a document management consultant and take your first step to being green.