| It is not enough to implement an EDMS solution that takes care of the documents that you generate as you go along. There is usually a large volume of documents that exist as paper documents. These documents have to be converted to electronic formats and introduced into the system. |
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| Stages in backlog conversion |
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| Backlog conversion can be divided into 5 phases - |
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Document Pre-processing |
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Scanning |
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Scanning QC |
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Indexing |
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Optical Character Recognition |
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| Document Pre-processing |
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| Documents to be scanned need to be cleaned and made ready for scanning. Staples need to be removed, creases straightened, sticky notes separated, etc. While these are small tasks, their magnitude increases when you consider that often several thousand documents are to be scanned - and very fast indeed. |
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| Scanning |
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| The scanning process is completed with minimal human intervention. Scanners used for backlog conversion are high speed scanners fitted with Automatic Document Feed (ADF). |
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| Depending on the volume and size of the sheets to be scanned, scanners with speeds between 60 to 500 sheets per minute are deployed. |
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| Scanning QC |
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| Scanned images often need to be processed before they are introduced into the system. Advanced toolkits allow operators to de-skew, rotate or remove noise and speckles from scanned images. |
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| Indexing |
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| Documents are referred to by certain indexed fields. User friendly data entry forms allow operators to enter these indexed fields. |
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| Optical Character Recognition |
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If you need documents to be created in editable formats rather than uneditable image formats, you could opt for the OCR package that allows you to convert scanned images to editable formats.
This would then involve the additional step of editing and proof reading, since OCR can offer results of only upto 90 percent for printed matter. The figure would be much lower if the documents contain hand written matter. |
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