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.

visit us at www.mgdocs.com

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.