Document Scanning

Document scanning is at the heart of a successful document management strategy. It is the process that takes the original paper document and converts it into an electronic image.

The first stage in the scanning process is the organisation of the documents. If the documents are not included in the items sent then these documents will not become part of the finished system. If all documents are available then they must be grouped or linked in a manner that is compatible with the work practices of the business. For example, Invoice number, Customer and date should be grouped if that is how Customers will check their payments. By not grouping information in the correct manner your business will encounter delays and off-set the benefits that an integrated document management process can provide.

VST will provide advice and recommendation to allow your business to choose the best scanning solution for you. This is a crucial stage in how your documents can be retrieved and making the wrong decision here will impact on your systems through the remainder of the process.

There are a wide variety of text conversion images available depending upon the requirements of your business and the paper documentation that you have. VST will advise on the best text conversion system.

A scanner is ultimately similar to a photocopier by making an electronic copy of the document. This electronic copy is known as a raster image, made up of tiny dots known as pixels that form a complete image in the same way as the dots on a television screen form a picture.

As a file on a computer system, the scanned image can be accessed across a network and opened using some imaging application software. To make this practical the scanned image is indexed, whereby filing information for the image is entered into a software package which uses this data to allow retrieval of the image.