Let Copier-Scanning Pay Off

“My copier is my scanner…”

“Everybody scans documents,” is a fairly safe statement. Almost everybody dreams of “going paperless” because it might save (pick some): The Planet, a Tree, a Whale, a Polar Bear. And any of these is a good thing. It might save mistakes and losses of information – and that’s important, too. It could save a life, keep someone out of jail, or find a missing person – more good things.

How we manage and rely on “scanned documents,” however, is VITAL to the success of the organization, or of the person, or of the DATA itself. The right DATA, at the right TIME, can be quickly converted to INFORMATION that REAL PEOPLE can make decisions with. It could make a sale and preserve a multi-year relationship; it could save people from making mistakes by shipping the wrong product, filing the wrong legal form, or prescribing the wrong medication.

Scanning bridges two ‘worlds’ of information: Paper and Digital. For all of our reliance on computers, we have also learned to be skeptical of what is happening to our information when it is reduced to magnetic bubbles in a black box or, worse, in the “Cloud.”

The explosion in “Security” services, softwares, consultants and devices, and the corresponding inventiveness of hackers and identity and other data thieves (including official “government / military” hackers) should have everyone with a computer or “smart” phone on permanent edge. With billions of transactions taking place every day, from Starbucks and McDonalds to Wall Street and International Banking, we are all both more dependent upon and more nervous about “electronic” data than ever before.

The ease of scanning has encouraged many, if not most of us to convert utterly stable PAPER data storage, into somewhat worrisome DIGITAL data storage. It is worth some planning, consideration and RE-consideration of what we are scanning and how to keep it as safe as paper has been for thousands of years.

FEAR NOT! We can help make scanning work for you and actually serve your most important purposes – even for quite small offices and operations. Here are the big issues:

  1. Volume of pages in paper format that you’d like to access on-screen.
  2. Daily volume of “new” scannings.
  3. Are you ‘archiving’ or creating ‘live,’ rapid-service/customer-service documents?
  4. Is access restricted within your organization?
  5. Are there legal requirements?
  6. Are you scanning for YOUR convenience, or is the Government making you do it?
  7. Do you need to access files from remote locations?
  8. Do you hope to resolve “filing” problems that papers make worse?
  9. Do you already have large numbers of digital files that are becoming hard to find?

These and many other questions are readily addressable. Copilabs has a long and glorious history of keeping copiers and printers CREATING paper documents. Now we work just as hard to help you transform them into electronic documents… without making them a new, costly problem.

Check out our pages on setting up scanning on copiers, and helpful hints for usage.