Selecting the best processes for document imaging - 2

This is the second post on how to select relevant business processes for document imaging. You can read the first post here .

Lets look at another example on how to decide whether a particular process is suitable for document imaging or not. Let’s imagine that we have a business objective to speed up the processes in order to reduce the response time to customer queries. So the first thing that we need to do is to list down all the processes relevant for customer interactions. Then we need to list down the different document types for each process and identify the relevant characteristics for each document such as;

• approx. how many documents are accessed / retrieved in a day?
• how easy is it to search a particular document and how long does it take ?
• What is the cost involved?
• What is the impact of reducing that access time?
• for how long we need to keep that document? etc…

 

Document Type	How many documents are accessed during a day	Time / Cost it takes to access a document	Importance / impact of quickly accessing a document	Retention Period
Insurance Policy	150	10 mins	high	7 years

When we have these details, then we can identify whether that document is a good candidate for document imaging or not. Of course there is no rule or formula for selection as it varies according to your objective. The key is to have a specific criteria so that the selection will be more objective. And it is important to decide on a selection criteria that aligns with your business goals.

As an example we can use some selection criteria based on the above table such as;

“If the impact is high and at least another one criteria is high then that document type is suitable for imaging”

One important thing to note is that this selection criteria should be aligned with your business objective. Otherwise it may result in an incorrect selection which will not help achieve the business goal. As an example think about the following criteria

“If the number of documents accessed a day is higher than 1,000 and the retention period is higher than 3 years then that document is suitable for imaging” -

For sure digitizing such documents will be beneficial for the organization in terms of archiving, saving working space etc…. But it will not help achieve your original business goal unless the impact of quickly accessing the document is high.

To summarize, the idea here is to have an objective selection process based on a criteria that aligns with the business objectives.  

Categories: ECM, imaging