Imagine that I have a time traveling DeLorean that can magically whisk you back in time to before you started your capture project. I know, you aren’t supposed to take rides from strangers, but let’s make an exception.
We’ve all heard the phrase that hindsight is 20/20, and while time machines don’t actually exist, we can still share some of the things we wish we had known before the process began.
Here are my top 5 tips that you probably wish you knew before you started your capture project.
1. Legacy document conversion plan
It didn’t take you a day to make a ton of paper, and it won’t all be scanned and indexed overnight. Have a plan to prioritize and determine what should be scanned, and what should just sit in a box or file cabinet until destruction.
2. Create a scope of work
If you fail to plan, you plan to fail! So make sure you engage all the stakeholders, including Bob from accounting. Set simple goals, diagram some basic capture workflows, and set milestones for what you want to accomplish. Oh and don’t forget training both initially, and ongoing.
3. Change management
Your team already has a way of capturing and storing information manually, and you have to understand that they have a comfort level with the process. To be really successful with your capture initiatives, you have to break the project into bite-size milestones that are easy to meet without scaring your end users. If you are an end user, encourage the project manager to make changes gradually.
4. Choice of vendor
Don’t believe everything a vendor tells you. Write this down, place it on a plaque in your office. I’d recommend taking a “trust but verify” approach, and don’t be afraid to ask for things like site visits with other customers, and a proof of concept for your own organization. In these economic times, they are willing to bend over to earn your business, so you might as well take advantage of it.
5. Indexing
How you index a document is critical, because it determines how you will find the data it contains in the future. If capture to you still means paper, consider your options for OCR and ICR, and come up with some basic templates to store the important information. If possible, think about replacing paper capture processes with things like
electronic forms. That way, you can capture information without having to scan or manually process things.
So internet, if you had a time machine and could go back before YOUR project began -what would you tell yourself and your team? Please share your tips and tricks in the comments.
#ScanningandCapture #Capture #scope #forms #indexing #vendors #OCR