Easy Isn't Always Nirvana

I am going to go out on a limb and say that most companies, outside of highly regulated industries, use a combination of shared network folders and individual user folders on the network to store and manage files like spreadsheets, Word files, scanned documents, reports and presentations.  The companies that have moved away from that approach may have adopted SharePoint, Google Documents or Box.  The beauty of all of these approaches to file management is that it is easy to create a filing structure and it is easy to add new files.  Users can copy, paste, add and cut their way to nirvana.  For a while, it is nirvana.  But at some point, it turns into a confusing mess.

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If your company has a shared drive that is only sharing headaches, give us a call.  We have helped many companies get to a better place.

www.mgdocs.com, info@mgdocs.com, (630) 279-0577 x122

To Destroy or Not to Destroy, that is the Real Question.

The destruction that I am referring to is not sinister or borne out of a desire to blow things up.  I am simply referring to the difficult decision that many companies agonize over when considering destroying their documents after those documents have been scanned.  

Fear not, there are answers available to help make the best decision, one way or another.  Read More

www.mgdocs.com, info@mgdocs.com, (630) 279-0577

Training, Overlooked and Underappreciated

I am a firm believer in the benefits of training.  A few of my reasons are as follows:

- Training leads to more consistent results
- Training leads to a shorter learning curve
- Training reduces the incidence of bad hires

These are all positives for any company and for all employees.  So why is training neglected or avoided?  I can think of a few negatives to training also, such as:

- Training takes time and time is money
- Training is boring and nobody pays attention
- Training is difficult in a fast changing business world

These may have some merit but they do not outweigh the benefits noted above.  So what does this have to do with document workflow or imaging?

Read More..


www.mgdocs.com, info@mgdocs.com, 630-279-0577 x122

Digital Document Organization - Got Folders?

Does your company store all of its digital documents in folders on a shared network drive or in static SharePoint folders?  If the filing method is by folder, how was that folder structure designed?  What are the rules for creating new folders or changing the names of existing folders?  Are there any requirements before a file can be saved to a particular folder?  How is security managed across the folders?  Why all the questions?

These are important questions when your company is trying to figure out how to be profitable and grow based on a critical business asset - Information.  After all, if your employees cannot find the information that they are looking for, the business is likely in serious trouble.  Read More

www.mgdocs.com, info@mgdocs.com, 630-279-0577 x122

A little Out There

Here are a few thoughts that might be a little out there but they do have some merit.

A national digital document Recorders Office.

Many, many years ago a great idea came about to have local governments keep “recorded” copies of real estate documents.  The purpose was generally to ensure that ownership could be proven and the legal relationship was recorded and recognized.  Each local government runs its own recording office for properties in its jurisdiction, but there isn’t a statewide or national “Recorder”.  This is also primarily a paper based process with actual document stamps.

With digital signature technology, endless online storage and internet access, it is easy to see how one entity could be the "Recorder" of all real estate transaction documents.  That would save governments countless billions of dollars on labor, storage and systems maintenance as well as user’s time and money for submitting and finding documents.

Location Services to connect you with your files and data.

Read more - Millennia Blog

www.mgdocs.com, info@mgdocs.com, 630-279-0577 x122

Taking Inventory of Your Digital Folders

There used to be a frequent occurrence at retail stores called "taking inventory", an all-night process with an army of workers.  It was a process of manually counting each unit of every product on the shelves to confirm the actual inventory with the inventory on the books.  Together with other data like deliveries this helped confirm sales numbers, but that was about all the data was good for.

This process has come a long way with the use of purchasing systems, UPC codes and registers with barcode reading, all feeding the same database.  Inventory is now up to the minute and able to generate automated workflows that send out restocking orders to the vendors.

So where is this going relative to document imaging and digital document management?  The analogy is the same when comparing the use of a static file folder method of document storage with the use of a database driven document management application.  A well designed file folder system on a network drive or in the cloud should allow you to find a document quickly if you know where to look.  If you need more that, you should use a database driven system.

Read More here - Millennia Blog

info@mgdocs.com, www.mgdocs.com, 630-279-0577

Ready, Set, Start that BPA Project (but only after reading this first)

The effort to improve a business process seems easy enough.  Map out the required information flow. Create a list of the parties involved.  Understand the security and legal requirements.  Crank up the visual workflow tool and get started.

Sometimes it does work that way, but sometimes each of these steps reveals deeper issues, missing data, incorrect data or inaccessible data.  Don't be discouraged, these issues can be solved and you can achieve the ROI that you desire.  Read on for a few ideas on how to succeed.

Millennia Blog

www.mgdocs.com, info@mgdocs.com, (630) 279-0577

Millennia Group provides Document Imaging, Workflow and Archival Applications along with Document Conversion Services.

Gym Shoes Required

Think about this statement pertaining to our hosted document management system FileStar - "Our heavy use customers have a cost per document viewed of less than $0.10 with many customers at $0.50 or less.  Think about that, less than $0.10 per view.  Compare that to the cost of simply going to a file cabinet to pull a document for viewing.  For an employee earning $40,000 per year, they would have ten seconds to get to the file cabinet and ten seconds to get back to their desk.  I hope your dress code allows gym shoes."

Read the full blog at Millennia Blog

For more information on Millennia Group and our document applications and services, please contact Michael Cipriano at mcipriano@mgdocs.com or 630-279-0577 x122.

Business Process Automation - How is your Company Doing?

According to Wikipedia, Business Process Automation (BPA) is “the strategy a business uses to automate processes in order to contain costs. It consists of integrating applications, restructuring labor resources and using software applications throughout the organization."

BPA, as you can see, is a broad definition and sounds like a massive undertaking. Yet companies successfully complete “BPA projects” - knowingly or unknowingly - all the time.

Examples of simple BPA projects include:

·         Accepting orders via online form (replacing the use of a fax machine or order clerk answering the phone).

·         Replacing monthly sales reports created manually in Excel with automated reports and dashboards created by CRM software like Salesforce.

·         Using Mail Merge to deliver customized marketing materials to customers and prospects.

We provide more examples here:

Millennia Blog

Organize, Consolidate and Share

Every company has information stashed in silos all across the enterprise.  There is paper in file cabinets, there are files on shared drives on the network, there are files stored in the cloud and of course there are files on users computers.  This situation is costly, risky and just plain inefficient.

Is it possible to create one consolidated, organized and shared silo, like a magic closet that always has in it exactly what you are looking for?  Maybe not, but it is possible to have fewer silos and one silo that has your critical business documents in it.  Millennia Group can help you get there.

You can read the full blog post at: Millennia Blog

www.mgdocs.com - www.collectdocs.com - (630) 279-0577 x122

What Processes Can Be Outsourced?

Virtually any process at any company can be outsourced. There are certain functions that a company would probably never feel comfortable outsourcing, but this is a case by case decision.  Apple outsources manufacturing.  Caterpiller outsources most of its sales.  Many companies outsource accounting and legal.  Many companies also outsource document processing.

As we all have heard, these outsourced tasks are generally referred to as non-core functions.  With documents, the receipt and routing of the document is generally not a core function of any business.  Its what you do with the document or with the content of the document that is probably a core function of the business.  If you are in the business of processing medical claims, the core function is to understand the billing codes and content of the claim request to make a judgement on paying that claim. Opening the envelope and delivering the document to the claim manager is not core.

Here is a short list of document related processes that can be outsourced and how:

- Mail receipt and routing:  have mail directed to a PO Box that an imaging service sweeps each day, opens the mail and forwards to an electronic inbox.  Intelligent routing rules can be established based on the PO Box number or a code on the document.

- Fax receipt:  Faxes can actually be received electronically and routed electronically without every becoming paper.  The faxes can be routed based on the fax number that they are sent to.

- Email receipt:  Documents delivered to a specific email address can be routed to specific workflow queues

- Data Entry:  Accounts payable documents can be scanned and even the information from the payable can be captured and entered into a system that feeds the accounting system.  This takes all but the approval process and cost code assignment and outsources it.

 - Contract Data Extraction:  Documents can be scanned and routed electronically to a company that will extract the terms into a contract management system.

- Conversion to PDF and OCR:  Documents that are scanned locally can be routed to outsourced back end processes that just convert the files to PDF and OCR the documents.

- Document Translation:  Documents that need to be translated can be scanned and routed to an outsourced service for translation

- Mail merging and printing: Many companies will mail merge from a data list and print and send paper documents (yes, paper is still created and sent).  Of course, mail merging and send electronically is what iContact and other newsletter services do every day.  This process can be used for investor letters, client notices, vendor communication, reporting and many other uses.

Visit us at www.mgdocs.com

We Have Seen the Light - And We Want You to See it Too

Very sorry for the long absence from this blog.  We have been busy searching for the meaning of Scanning so to speak.  Millennia Group has been a scanning service bureau or scanning services company for 17 years now.  We have always put customer first and that has meant providing our valued customers with scanning services that they wanted and were willing to fund.  There is no question that when the economy was really good, the willingness to fund scanning projects was far greater than it is today.  The underlying reasons to scan have not changed, but the willingness to fund them has, shall we say, tightened up a bit.  And we understand that.  This has caused us and our clients to look deeply at the reasons for a scanning project.  The results of that look are really not surprising.

What we have come to fully embrace and advocate is that scanning needs to be looked at as part of business process improvement.  Scanning is not a means to empty a basement full of boxes or to Go Paperless.  Scanning is also not just a means to satisfy the disaster recovery team or to eliminate some file cabinets.  While it is true that those things can be the result of scanning, scanning must be tied to business process improvement to get past the justifiable financial scrutiny.

For this reason, over the past year, we have been starting the conversation with companies that call and want us to "scan all of their documents" with this simple question - Why?  What is this project going to do to improve your business?  Will it turn a paper based routing and approval process into a paperless process with tracking, notices and an audit trail?  Yes, we are on board and we can help you with that.  Will it give your dispersed and mobile workforce better access to customer and project documentation and let those remote users upload new documents?  Yes, we are on board with this too and we can definitely help.

Be willing to have a thick skin and maybe look hard at some internal processes that may not be optimal or in fact broken.  Embrace some well thought out change.  Now scanning is really going to improve your business.

visit us at www.mgdocs.com

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.

visit us at www.mgdocs.com

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.

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

Compliance and Audit - Imaging Helps?

Two business areas that can benefit, or suffer, from imaging are compliance and audits. Here is why - unless your imaging process is tightly controlled, the risk of mis-information is equal to or greater than a paper based system. What could be some control points. Centralized scanning could be. This might create a bit more consistency in how documents are classified and saved vs leaving that task up to every individual user in the company. There will undoubtedly be spelling errors, mis-interpretations, mistakes and duplicated efforts, some of which might go away with centralized operations. A review step can also help, but that adds a layer of management and cost on the process. Structured file names. Can work, but round things don't always fit into square holes nicely. Workflow rules. That is a great way to ensure consistency and accuracy. A component of Workflow is source data as in matching invoices to the source accounting entry in the accounting system or matching the contract to the customer in the CRM. More to come.

Please Visit us at www.mgdocs.com