Best practices to digitize your paper archives

Are your archives and cabinets full of paper documents? Are you spending way too much time to find and consult information, not to mention the important space taken in the office? Fortunately, there are many ways to get rid of these concerns while guaranteeing secure and confidential access to documents, let’s see together how!

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  1. Define the scope of the project

You do not necessarily need to digitize all documents. Think about it and select those that are priorities depending on your company’s activity. To do so you will need to assemble all coworkers involved to figure out the key points of the project:

# The age of the documents,
# The types of documents,
# Select by category, or by subcategory,
# In which format (PDF or another),
# The person in charge of the scanning,
# The documents to be destroyed post-scanning.

  1. Choose the right scanning equipment

Now you have a wide range of excellent MFPs and scanners you can choose your solution from. You will have to take into account the volume of documents and the audit previously carried out to make the best choice.

  1. Index to better find next

To master the indexing of documents, you must associate metadata/tags to documents which will allow their identification, thus will greatly help classification in a structured tree and subsequent research thanks to an established naming rule. If you want a more precise identification, the longer and more tedious the indexing time will be. Or, you can use another method to simplify the process:

# Barcode: Affix a barcode to the first page of a batch of documents, with the year and the name. The scanner will classify them in a structured way by batch according to the value attributed to the barcode.
# Intelligent data capture tool: Go further regarding the recognition of key information (type and date of the document, …) thanks to an OCS engine that allows capturing a set of words in each document.

  1. Secure your company memory records

# Store all documents on server or Cloud as per the classification plan with a powerful electronic document management solution.
# Define access rights for people and groups to select who can access which information.
# Guarantee ultra-security with the electronic safe box where only the owner can access documents stored in it.
# Find in a few seconds the information previously stored/indexed thanks to the integrated search engine anywhere and anytime.