With bulk scanning you can easily take a huge pile of paper documents and put them through a bulk scanner which then converts them to electronic images that can be saved to the cloud for easy retrieval.  The paper can then be destroyed which saves the company financial costs in the long term. Would you define this as “Easy” or “Difficult”?

Firstly, let’s define “Easy” vs “Difficult”.

Easy = Achieved without great effort, presenting few difficulties.

Difficult = Needing much effort or skill to accomplish, deal with, or understand.

These were the Business Requirements: 425 000 files with 4 images per file = 1 700 000 actual images. As they were clinical records they came from various clinic’s, across various districts and provinces within South Africa. They had been boxed and sent to a central location for my team to come in and do bulk scanning on-site.

The first step in the bulk scanning process is preparing the documents for scanning. Each box had to be sorted by clinic, client, and date. Every single document had to be in perfect order before scanning could begin and sorted precisely. Needless to say that I think my team was sending me silent hate signals as this was an extremely tedious process that required literally sorting and prepping 1.7 million pages of documents.

The second step was to perform quality checks on each box of documents to ensure each pack of documents were correctly prepped before being put through the bulk scanner. One missed staple could damage a bulk scanner and the costs would be extremely high to replace the scanner.

The third step was bulk scanning paper documents in the files, ensuring the quality was exceptional and loading onto a shared file server.

The fourth step was then indexing each file for easy retrieval. The key to this process is ensuring there was a unique identifier per file for quick and easy retrieval.

The fifth step was to perform the final quality control and verify that all images in each box were scanned and available electronically.

Verdict!

Was this easy or difficult! Parts of the project were difficult especially when it came to the challenges experienced in the preparation and scanning of the documents. However, with a well trained team and perfectly prepped documents the project was easy enough to complete in 2 months!!