The Pain:  The inability to manage growth

Success can be a mixed bag. Even as your company earns more customers and gains more revenue, you also may need larger facilities and more employees just to keep up with the pace. This can be costly and nerve-wracking. To top it off, by the time your company gets caught up, it’s time to expand again.

These growing pains can carry over into specific areas of your business, such as the processing of data off the increasing number of documents your company receives as it grows.

Some of the reasons for your pain include:

• Increased volume of documents to process:  With a higher volume of paper documents and forms, your company will spend even more time and resources to manually process the critical data off them. That means more sorting and more manually keying in data. And more headaches.

• No budget for additional data entry operators:  Your company will likely want to curb costs as it grows. Unfortunately, this can affect your department’s budget plan. The additional staff you need to handle the increased workload might not be approved. So, while the volume of your documents increases, the resources to process them might not. The results are often stressed employees and an ever-growing backlog.

• Increased storage costs:  As the volume of paper documents coming into your company increases, so does the space and cost to store them. According to Pricewaterhouse Coopers, the average organization spends $20 in labor just to file a document. Add to that the space it takes to store these filed documents. Onsite storage will take up more and more of your office’s real estate. If you store your documents offsite, these costs will continue to rise with increased demand for space.

• Increased time to retrieve information: As more documents are added to your onsite or offsite storage, additional time is spent to track down documents when you need them. As a result, productivity suffers.

• Lost information: As more and more documents get filed and stored away, the risk because greater that some of them will get lost. And if they do, it can be costly. Pricewaterhouse Coopers reports that it takes $120 for an organization to relocate a lost or misfiled document.* This can quickly eat into your new revenue. Not only that, but lost documents add to the headaches that growing pains can bring.

• Compliance issues: With Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX) regulating accounting principles for publicly-traded companies and HIPAA demanding compliance in the healthcare arena, as your organization grows, it may need to develop processes to prove accountability. This includes the way your organization processes incoming documents.

An automated document and data capture solution can cure these pains.
To be effective, you’ll need one with the following capabilities:

• Keeps document processing under control: With an effective document and data capture solution, you can process more documents than ever before, and the precise data you need off them, in a fraction of the time. Stacks of documents that once took days to process now take just hours. Backlogs dwindle down to almost nothing. Sorting is all but eliminated and manual data entry is a thing of the past.

• Eliminates the need for additional staff: Not only will you save time by automating, you’ll save labor hours. Instead of additional staff, you’ll actually process more documents in less time with far fewer people. Because of this, you can free up employees to perform more business-critical tasks.

• Drastically reduces the need for document storage: As your paper documents get scanned, digital copies of them get stored into your ERP or ECM system, where it resides for as long as you need it. The digital copy is a legally acceptable version of the original, so the time required to store the paper version is diminished significantly. Your offsite storage costs will shrink and your available onsite space will grow.

• Retrieves documents instantly: Your employees can access an electronic version of the original document right from their desktop. No more wasted time sorting through a file room or offsite storage facility for the information they need.

• Lets you keep track of all your documents: Almost as soon as documents reach your organization they can be scanned and automatically indexed and captured into your ERP or ECM system before they get a chance to be misplaced. And with a distributed capture environment, branch offices across the street or around the world can scan their documents onsite for automated data processing at the corporate office. By doing so, they eliminate the costs and risks of mailing or faxing their documents to corporate for processing.

• Adjusts document images automatically: You want to seamlessly process the hundreds or even thousands of additional documents you will receive during your company’s growth, and a good automated solution lets you do just that. Automatic document rotation and image enhancement allow you to improve document images on the fly. Customizable business rules let you determine precisely which data to capture, how to validate the data, and define how its output should be formatted.

• Grows with your company: Be careful when deciding on a solution. Many can be limited and actually lose money for your company, since they constantly need to be revamped as your document volume increases. Your company needs a scalable solution that can grow along with it. It should be easy for you to add operators, locally or remotely, when future volume requires it.

• Saves money when you need it most: Many companies worldwide save as much as several hundred thousand dollars each year by implementing an automated document and data capture solution. The money your company saves can be used to ramp up business to the next level.

• Helps you become compliant sooner, not later: Electronic copies serve as acceptable substitutes for original documents in many industries. As a result, any documents you need to retain in order to become compliant with Sarbanes-Oxley, HIPAA or any other government
  regulatory act can be safely stored electronically and indefinitely.

Learn how an expanding service bureau with no space to accommodate employees used an AnyDoc solution to eliminate their night shift and realize 99.5% accuracy.

An automated document and data solution from AnyDoc Software can help your company process the influx of documents your new customers will bring, regardless of what types of documents you process.

* Ed Hess, “Capture Images, Capture Savings,” Integrated Solutions Magazine, December 2002.