Scanning In The Modern World

The move to a more digitised office has been expedited by the pandemic and the restrictions it has placed on our ability to work effectively.  We have all been faced with a new set of challenges to deal with in order to remain both solvent and competitive.

Instant Secure Access

With all your documents and files in electronic format, it means that all of your staff can access them from anywhere.  This is of course particularly useful at the moment, when we’re all working from disparate locations.  Even when restrictions are lifted, the likelihood is that not all staff will return at the same time and staggered office times will be implemented.  As these waters muddy, it is essential that it doesn’t handicap your workers; being able to access the relevant information instantly, and with a full audit trail, could become the most important thing that your company does this year!

A Flexible Team

For the most part it seems that this enforced experiment of working from home en masse has actually been very successful.  It looks like many companies, large and small, will be re-evaluating the need to have as much physical office space.  This will obviously drastically cut overheads and make a positive impact on the bottom line.  Being able to access your company’s data at the click of a button in a secure environment, rather than relying on physical files, will be a big part of this.

Top Tips

We’ve had a look at why scanning has moved from a useful tool to an essential one in the modern office, so let’s have a look at some specific features that will make your working life that much easier.

Barcode Scanning

• This simple addition could save you loads of time and make tasks that are challenging at the moment super easy.  For example, with the daily post - whether you are in the office or working from home, simply add a barcode for each user prior to scanning.  Stack the all the bundles in the scanner, it will read the barcode and auto file the docs according to the correct users file location – all ready to be accessed by the user.
• Taking it to the next level, this also includes auto file creation - if a file name doesn’t exist it will automatically create the file and file the documents for you.

Highlighter Zone OCR Scanning

• Another time saving option.  This time, let’s use an invoice as an example.  Take a highlighter pen and mark round the name of the invoice supplier, and then using the highlighter pen again highlight the invoice number or purchase number. When scanned it will add both highlighted sections as the meta data on the file name. It will then file it accordingly, and again if no file exists it will create the file for storage.

OCR & Scan conversion 

• Whilst scanning you can turn on the OCR (Optical Character Recognition) to search text in a document, or simply convert the document to a Word, Excel or Powerpoint format.
• Scan to cloud based software i.e DropBOX, One Drive, One Drive for Buisness, Sharepoint, Google Drive, Gmail, G-suite, and Box.
• Data extraction – once scanned, you can simply extract any data from the scanned image, as a scan is just an image but the data is priceless.

Hopefully this look at how modern scanning solutions have advanced in order to address our current working conditions has been helpful.  These are some seriously handy innovations that can transform the way you work, and make the access to the information you require a piece of cake.

If you’d like to know more, or would like some guidance on which scanning solutions would work best for your 2021 office environment, then just drop us an email or call us on 01934 742 184.