In North America, the market for document scanners grew by 7% last year, primarily due to new solutions that reduce costs and improve the overall efficiency of manual processes at an office. A renewed importance has been placed on the document capture technology sector because of the growth in document scanning devices.
Even in this challenging businesses environment, more and more companies are adopting the technology and resources they need to go completely paperless.
Whether you choose a professional document scanning company or try to do it yourself with in-house scanning devices, document scanning and management ultimately give businesses the tools they need to remain competitive. By improving a company’s ROI, they also mitigate risk, reduce overhead, and improve productivity and customer service.
Your document scanning should be done on the right type of scanner, and not every scanner model is suitable for going paperless. Most inexpensive flatbed document scanners lack and automatic document feeder, and cannot process your materials fast enough to be cost-effective. Some high-speed, sheet fed scanners seem right, but they cannot handle books and magazines, and in many cases cannot handle fragile or odd shaped documents.
Your scanner should combine the benefits of both flatbed and sheet-fed scanners, with the ability to process images at the rate of at least 10 per minute. These can run about $800 or more, but on a page-per-minute basis, they will quickly pay for themselves.
Alternatively, a professional document scanning service can offer better ROI, since they not only scan your documents professionally using a variety of appropriate scanners, most can also store and archive your paper records. This type of service works especially well for medical and legal practices.