Follow the Leader - Please!

Recently I received a notice via email from the Government and I have to say it was very exiting.  It was a PDF file and when I opened the PDF, there was a very impressive first page with official Executive Office seals and insignia.  Here is what the opening said: 

"EXECUTIVE OFFICE OF THE PRESIDENT
OFFICE OF MANAGEMENT AND BUDGET
WASHINGTON, D.C. 20503
NATIONAL ARCHIVES AND RECORDS ADMINISTRATION
WASHINGTON, D.C. 20408
August 24, 2012

On November 28, 2011, President Obama signed the Presidential Memorandum -Managing Government Records. This memorandum marked the beginning of an Executive Branch-wide effort to reform records management policies and practices and to develop a 21st-century framework for the management of Government records. "

 

The memorandum goes on to talk about document imaging and this is what really got me excited - "This directive requires that to the fullest extent possible, agencies eliminate paper and use electronic recordkeeping. "

 

http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2011/11/28/presidential-memorandum-managing-government-records

 

As you can appreciate, as a document imaging service bureau, the more momentum there is to convert paper to digital, the better.  The government taking a leadership role will certainly help bring along many more companies to the digital revolution.  But really, when I read between the lines and read more of the directive, the rationale for the directive is just good solid business sense.  Keep your information organized and accessible and you will be a more efficient organization. 

Follow the leader, it's good for your organization and it just so happens to be good for Millennia Group too.  Thank you Mr. President!

A Slippery Slope

Our blog title - "Tackling Mountains of Docs" is very top of mind lately. We have just launched a new service aimed squarely at Iron Mountain - controller of mountains of boxes of documents. Our service is a combination of technology, hard work and process but in the end, it is just common sense. We call our new service I:S Cubed as in Inventory: Scan, Shred or Store.

The point of the service is if you use some basic logic in making decisions, it is not all that painful to make that decision. Iron Mountain and other box storage firms have grown very large and accumulated a vast amount of boxes because its difficult to make decisions about the mysterious contents. Rather than sweep the boxes under the rug so to speak, take back control. As our service clearly states, start with taking an inventory. Find out what is in those boxes. Once you have the inventory you can make the decisions that need to be made - Scan, Shred or Store.

You should compare that inventory to your records retention schedule or at the very least talk to your accountant and attorney to find out best practices for retention of various document types. Armed with this information you will find it easy to make good, common sense decisions. You will not only save money in the long run, you will be surprised at the important corporate knowledge that you find and you will sleep better knowing you are effectively managing your litigation exposure.

If you are just starting to accumulate boxes in off-site storage, keep a very detailed inventory in a database or spreadsheet. Don't start sliding down that slippery slope.

Scanner + Intern Does Not Equal Green

The scanning service bureau world has heard these words a thousand times - "no thanks, we are going to hire some interns and scan all of the documents with our new scanner". I am sure all of our fellow service providers are nodding, yep they have heard those same words.

On the surface it seems like a good idea. Hire college kids for $10/hour, buy a $2,500 scanner that does 75 pages per minute, point them to the file room and get it done. Some math is done to estimate the total cost and to get an idea of when the project will be complete. Sounds good, doesn't it. Clear out that file room. Have documents available on the computer. Less paper in the office. What a great story - Green Green Green.

Here is the rest of the story. The CEO has lunch with a critical customer who wants to double his orders in a new area if the price is right. The problem is when the CEO asks for data to support the pricing, nobody can find the information. Everyone is sure the documents that contain the data were scanned. The documents were in the file cabinet and the interns scanned all the documents in that cabinet. The CFO, the COO, the Director of Sales, two associates and a forensic specialist are brought in to find these files. Two days later they were found on a local drive in the iTunes folder - oops.

I don't think I need to do the math on what it cost to try to find those documents. I also don't want anyone to get the idea that it was a bad idea to scan in the first place. Quite the contrary, it was a great idea to scan. But, like most things in life, it is not that it was a bad idea or bad timing or the wrong people, it can usually be summed up by saying it was poor execution.

Scanner + Intern + Planning can equal Green. Call a service bureau to help consult you on the planning part. Then you will see Green and not Red at an inopportune time.

It's not about Millennia Group

We are a very proud and dedicated group of people at Millennia. We take pride in the quality of the work we do and we have been happy to tell everyone along the way - 15 years worth today to be exact. We have been telling everyone about our fantastic internal process and procedures and the great Kodak equipment we use for scanning. Of course we have told everyone that we use Kofax, the industry leading document capture software to make sure our clients are getting the best images they can. Our client list is proudly displayed on our web site and we love to mention the great client names that we have serviced successfully over the years. But, you know what? it's not about Millennia Group.

I have recently been doing some deep dive sales and marketing analysis and discovered that our prospects and clients were only secondarily interested in the How We Do It. They basically heard blah, blah, blah. Until I mentioned that they could cut 75% of the cost out of creating and maintaining paper based customer files or how they would be able to find any executed legal contract in seconds and never leave their chair, did they start to listen. Only when I mentioned that they could sleep better at night knowing all the employee files were backed up since we scanned them did people stop hearing blah blah blah and started to get as excited as we were.

We have always been good listeners and we have always worked hard to help our clients solve problems and deliver cost saving results. We just never learned to describe What We Do as What The Benefit Is or What The Result Is. So you will likely see some changes at Millennia Group. We are still very proud of how we do what we do but we are going to scream Why We Do It from now on. That is much more exciting - for both of us.

Visit us at www.mgdocs.com and watch for changes. Thank you.

It's Not About the Scanning

Almost every inquiry we receive regarding a potential scanning project includes a discussion and focus on the scan resolution (commonly referred to as Dots Per Inch, DPI), file type (PDF or TIFF), logistics of pickup and drop off, prep and re-assembly. Very few of the discussions initially focus on the indexing or categorization and organization of the files. It is mostly an afterthought by the potential customer, as if the entire project is all about the conversion and not about how they can benefit from having the documents easily accessible.

Over the years we have determined that the value of our services is not really in the quality of the scans or how well we re-assemble. We know we do those things very well and those project elements are critical to a successful conversion. But the real value in what Millennia Group provides is the organization and rationalization of the information so that users can find what they need quickly and have confidence that they have the full picture.

Let me describe a scenario that is fairly typical. I have used employee files in the example, but the concept is the same for all types of files and records. Let's assume a company has 2,000 employees and their employee files consist of personnel records, benefits documents, I-9's and all the other documents typically found in the employees folder or folders. Many companies will look at these files and start scanning the documents because it seems simple to have a temp just scan each employee folder as one PDF file and save it to a network drive. So that one PDF for that one employee has all the documents in it including the I-9. Let's say that file is for Mary Adams, so it is saved as maryadams.pdf. Seems pretty straight forward.

Looks can be deceiving. First of all, Mary gets married and is now Mary Reynolds. Hopefully someone will remember to manually go and rename the PDF to maryreynolds.pdf. Secondly, if there is an audit of the I-9's, they will have to go dig out the paper files because the auditors should not have access to all the other documents in the PDF like the background check or the medical information. How about the fact that managers really should only have access to the employees in their region, not easy to do on a shared folder on the network. How about the annual review PDF's that are stored in a different location on the network? Should those be merged into the other PDF for Mary or should users just know to go look somewhere else? How about terminated employees, are their files moved to a different location in the shared folder so that the retention schedule can be activated? Would anyone ever like to audit the files of all employees in a particular office? Can't be done if they are named the way we named the PDFs.

These are just some of the reasons that organization and indexing are so important in every scanning project. This effort is what really justifies the cost of scanning - cost savings from more accessible and complete information.

Please visit us at www.mgdocs.com

Making Good Decisions

As a parent I know that I have said "make good decisions" to my children and I hope that they do as they go through life. That thought almost becomes more basic, more black and white in the business world. We have spreadsheets that we create to help us make good decisions. We do research on Google and other websites to find out information. We use credit reporting agencies, background checks and we read research reports from industry associations. There is an overwhelming amount of information out there.

So how does this relate to document imaging and document management? For businesses that have been around for a while many decisions are made based on prior experience. The vast majority of that prior experience is trapped in paper documents and in the heads of employees who are still around to remember. One of those known archives can be preserved theoretically forever, while the other lasts until age 65 or the next layoff. Protect your corporate knowledge and history by scanning those business documents.

An amazing amount of highly useful history and data resides in the paper documents that are the "prior experience" of any company. Document imaging, done correctly, can put that experience within instant reach of your employees and new decision makers. It is not someone elses experience that you have read about on google, it is actual experience for your company, real data based on your exact products or services. Don't think of document imaging as just a way to get compliant for business continuity purposes, or a way to go green, think of it as a way to go Black, as in not in the Red. Empower your employees with a tool that will lead to better decisions - convert your critical business documents to digital image.

Please visit us at www.mgdocs.com

When is a Million not a Million?

Most of our customers and prospects look at a wall of file cabinets or room full of boxes and immediately think "there must be a million pages here". They may be right, but they may be wrong. The correct answer or as close as you can get to the correct answer is extremely important in terms of the total cost of your imaging project and justifying your project.

If the cost to scan, prep, index and re-assemble (I don't like just saying the "cost to scan", since scanning is far more complicated than a single step) is $0.10 per page it makes a big difference if you have 1,000,000 pages or 100,000 pages. There is a huge difference between a budget of $100,000 and $10,000. As an example of how important page count is to the total project budget lets see what the budget is if we increase the cost per page by 50%.

If the project includes 100,000 pages and the cost per page increases by 50% to $0.15 per page, the budget increases from $10,000 to $15,000. $5,000 is a lot of money, but that difference is not usually a show stopper. So if a prospect call us and says "I need a quote to scan 100,000 pages", we can misjudge the complexity of the project by 50% and not really jeopardize the budget or shock the prospect.

If the prospect had said, "I think we must have 1,000,000 pages to scan", then it really doesn't matter what the price per page is, the nominal amount of the budget increases so dramatically that it does become a show stopper. Of course 1,000,000 pages at $0.10 is $100,000, much different than $10,000. Even if we are off on the price by 50%, $150,000 is really not in a different league than $100,000.

This is why page count is so important. Take a close look at the documents in the file cabinets and in the boxes. Maybe there are documents that really don't need to be scanned, which may significantly reduce page count. Take some test counts of the pages in each box or each folder and try to accurately extrapolate out the total number of actual pages that will be scanned. You might also be able to split the project into smaller parts to spread the budget out over a longer period of time.

Price per page is important and there are many variables that go into the cost of any project. However, an accurate estimate of the total page count will typically have the largest impact on total project cost.

Please visit us at www.mgdocs.com