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The Top 10 Mistakes Companies Make When Deploying a Document Scanning Solution

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The Top 10 Mistakes Companies Make When Deploying a Document Scanning Solution

Recent studies have shown that document scanning remains one of the top technology priorities of organizations, regardless of their size or their vertical market. Little wonder: when properly deployed, document scanning solutions deliver a tremendous payback – in terms of cost savings, faster turnaround, better quality, streamlined compliance and more. But mistakes during system implementation can undermine even the strongest business case for a document scanning solution.

To help keep your document scanning project on the right track, here are the 10 most
common mistakes that organizations make when deploying the technology – and how
to avoid them.
 
1. Not buying enough scanning capacity. Too often, organizations use their
average document processing volumes when determining scanning capacity. But
organizations must also consider variables such as peak daily volume, required or
contracted deadlines for completing work, and the effective throughput (not the
advertised speeds) of the scanners that they are considering buying.
 
In one case, a firm that had originally modeled its scanning capacity based on its
average volume discovered that it would require another nine scanners to handle the
peak daily volumes that it received every Monday and Tuesday. With only 15 scanners
in its solution design, the firm would have needed to add a second shift to complete its
work, in turn, obliterating its business case.
 
2. Not including all stakeholders – both business and IT – in the requirements
definition. In some cases, the IT department will unilaterally choose the
organization’s scanners, in turn, saddling operations with scanners that don’t meet
their requirements or are not easy for operators to use. In other cases, an operations
team will select scanners without the IT department’s involvement only to discover
that the organization’s legacy systems and/or infrastructure can’t support the
scanners.
 
This is a common mistake for business process outsourcers (BPOs), where IT
departments try to standardize on one type of scanner. Because these decisions are
typically made based on past experience with a scanner, the BPOs end up with a fleet
of inefficient lower-volume scanners.
 
To avoid these scenarios, business and IT stakeholders should meet early-on
during the process of selecting a scanning solution to determine critical business
requirements, and identify any potential infrastructure considerations (such as
additional IT support, larger network pipe or more PCs).
 
3. Buying a solution without conducting a proof of concept. Organizations should
never purchase a scanner without first seeing how it processes their documents. Too
many organizations buy document scanning technology based on what they read in
a brochure or see on a trade show. They need to test whether the scanner fits their
business requirements and processing environment. Organizations also want to have
some of their operators run the scanner to test usability.
 
For instance, one company was enamored with the idea of prepping and scanning
documents in the same step, believing that this approach would reduce its number of
full-time equivalents (FTEs). However, a proof of concept showed that the company
would actually have to add staff and a significant number of scanners if it deployed this
type of system. By conducting a proof of concept, the company avoided this misstep
without incurring significant out-of-pocket expense. A proof of concept also is an
ideal time to test a scanner’s image quality: end-users can visually inspect images
generated by scanner, or even run them through their downstream applications.
 
The good news: users are typically welcome to bring work to a vendor’s offices for
a proof of concept. In some cases, a vendor may be willing to deliver a scanner for
testing at a customer site.
 
4. Making decisions on front-end and back-end systems separately. An
organization’s front-end scanning and capture solution must work in concert with its
back-end workflow technology. For instance, organizations must ensure that their
document scanning and capture solution can output images and data in the format
required for back-end systems, whether it’s flat files, XML files, Excel spreadsheets or
database output. In one case, a BPO purchased a scanning and capture solution that
could only output images and data in one format. This resulted in the BPO spending
a lot of time and money reconfiguring the output to the various formats that its
customers required.
 
To avoid this situation, organizations should ask vendors how their scanning and
capture solutions integrate with back-end systems, and whether their architecture is
“open” or proprietary. An open architecture will typically output data and images in
any format that the end-user requires.
 
Organizations also need to ensure that their back-end systems are fast enough to
keep up with their front-end solutions otherwise they will experience bottlenecks in
the “hand-off” of images and data. We’ve seen delays as much as 35 to 40 percent
between front-end and back-end systems.
 
5. Not coordinating software and hardware vendors during system deployment.
No one wins in this scenario. A lack of coordination typically results in wasted
effort, finger pointing and delayed implementations. We’ve seen many cases where
front-end and back-end solutions providers get their systems up and running at a
customer site, but there is no integration because the vendors and the customer never
discussed critical issues such as: what data needs to be passed from one system to
another, the image formats required for back-end systems, and how data should be
routed.
 
To ensure a tight integration between systems, as well as a smooth implementation,
it’s important that end-users bring together all of their vendors and internal
stakeholders early in the process to coordinate the system deployment. And don’t
allow individual departments, such as IT, to manage parts of the implementation, or
you may also have miscommunication and missed hand-offs.
 
6. Not using a phased implementation approach. In their drive for fast results, too
many organizations bite off more than they can chew when implementing a scanning
solution. Trying to deploy an entire system at once can overwhelm internal resources,
and draw out the deployment, in turn, putting the entire project at risk of getting shut
down. Instead, organizations should determine where they can have the biggest
impact on their operations with the least amount of change; they shouldn’t break
a process that isn’t broken. With an initial success under their belts, users should
similarly prioritize the next phases of their implementation based on their potential
benefits.
 
7. Letting “fear of change” take over. Too many organizations are close minded
when it comes to re-engineering their processes, falling back on the way they’ve done
things for the past five or 10 years. For instance, some organizations manually count
every document that they scan, and write a number on the first page of each batch.
This process was necessitated by older technology that was prone to double-feeds or
didn’t have automatic document counters. However, there is no need to do this with
today’s scanning technology, and continuing to do so, creates needless, not to mention
costly, work. The best strategy for helping your staff overcome their fear of change is
to let them see the technology run firsthand. Once they see that the scanner detects
double-feeds and counts documents, as examples, they’ll recognize the impact it will
have on document preparation.
 
8. Not thinking LEAN. Organizations should always be looking for ways to do more
with less. For instance, organizations shouldn’t automatically purchase more of their
legacy scanners as their volume grows; there may be other scanners available that
enable them to consolidate hardware. Similarly, most organizations can do a more
efficient job of document preparation; there’s no need to tape small documents to 8 ½
x 11-inch paper, or to use multiple separator sheets for scanning.
 
9. Not cutting the paper cord. Many organizations use unique transaction separator
sheets for each type of work that they process, creating an enormous breadth
and volume of paper. Today’s document scanning solutions are an opportunity for
organizations to rid themselves of this paper, automatically separating transactions
based on documents (e.g. checks or envelopes) within a batch. The technology also
allows organizations to insert generic separator sheets that can be re-used; one
company has re-used its generic separator sheets for the past five years, saving
significant money.
 
10. Not sharing – as in shared services. With the economy still struggling, and capital
budgets tight, organizations should look to consolidate multiple scanning functions on
a single platform.
 
Properly deployed, document scanning solutions deliver tremendous results. But
mistakes during implementation can undermine even the strongest business case
for the technology. Avoiding the 10 mistakes described above will help ensure the
success of your organization’s scanning project.
 
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