One of the enduring reminders of September 11th is the indelible image of paper documents floating through the air—records irretrievably lost as the result of a terrible, unforeseen disaster. This memory, combined with the ever-present threat of natural disasters and a more recent driver—regulatory compliance requirements—is creating a sea of change in the way enterprises manage business-critical records. Today, users in every sector are employing small and large-format scanners, MFPs, and electronic content management systems to keep documents safe and accessible. "It used to be there wasn’t much thought about protecting documents," says InfoTrends/

CAP Ventures analyst, Susan Moyse. "After September 11th and the Enron and Tyco scandals, the government enacted legislation that put CEOs and boards on the hot seat, making them accountable for accurate record-keeping. Now, several drivers including Sarbanes–Oxley, HIPAA, Check 21, and Clinton’s Paperwork Reduction Act are causing organizations to rethink records management. Five years ago scanning technology was a nice-to-have. Today, it’s a priority."

Joe Paradiso of Imaging 411 Inc., a value added resesller and SunRise Imaging Inc. reseller concurs, "After September 11th and, more recently, the tsunami, people realized their disaster recovery strategies didn’t go far enough towards protecting valuable data. In most cases they only addressed isolated incidents in immediate locations. Threats like natural disasters, wide-spread blackouts, and terrorism force organizations to consider more remote, secure locations for data storage sites."

Michael Harris, president Smooth Solutions, Inc., adds, "The New York City School Construction Authority implemented a document management system for all construction contract documents associated with every public school. That’s more than 1,600 schools...Now every employee, contractor, consultant, and city agency has electronic access to these construction documents."

The Move to Digital Records
Regulatory compliance, particularly in the small-format world, is driving heightened interest in scanning for records management. "The legal issues facing public accounting firms have either helped to form or pushed compliance regulations like HIPAA, Sarbanes–Oxley, and SEC rule 17a-4 into the spotlight," says InfoTrends/CAP Ventures analyst Joel Mazza. "These standards are putting pressure on the healthcare, legal, and financial services industries to maintain records in compliance with specific guidelines."

In fact, sections of Sarbanes–Oxley mandate that audit work papers and other information related to any audit report must be kept for a minimum of seven years. The act also has a section (403ET) that specifically outlines the need for an e-filing system in congruence with the Clinton Paperwork Reduction Act.

"The key to ensuring compliance is rooted not just in technology," says Mazza, "but rather in a mix of technology and process. Organizations need to make sure employees follow the necessary steps to make their record-keeping processes compliant with industry regulations through employee training and the development of user manuals."

Eric B. Heyer is senior vice president, CFO, and CTO for the American Bank of New Jersey, a rapidly growing, $430 million community bank. Heyer says, "We immediately became subject to compliance requirements relating to Sarbanes–Oxley, the office of thrift supervision, and the Patriot Act, under the umbrella of the anti-money laundering and bank secrecy acts."

"In the old days when someone requested a wire transfer we’d go to the treasury area, prepare a paper form, and initiate the transfer," says Heyer. "If we had to go back and find a wire transfer record, searching through books could take up to two weeks. And if the books went up in flames, we had no other records."

Today American Bank of New Jersey uses a comprehensive imaging solution that combines Tokairo, Ltd.’s TokOpen enterprise content management (ECM) software, a scanning infrastructure, and Fujitsu scanners to capture wire transfer information electronically and index it with the customer name, tax ID, and the name of the originating or destination bank. Heyer notes, "If the FBI comes in and wants a record of every wire transfer that Mr. Smith sent to a particular bank on a certain date, we simply query our document management system and have an answer in seconds."

"If there’s a fire and the building becomes a crater, we don’t lose critical records. And we provide better customer service because tellers can instantly pull up customer information at any branch," Heyer states, "As a small community bank, the great thing about this technology is that ten years ago it was so far out of reach we could never have afforded it. Today it’s priced so that we can compete with the big boys."

Paul E. Szemplinski, president and CEO of Integrated Document Technologies, Inc. notes, "Say an invoice has a life of seven years. Previously, you’d put it in a banker’s box, write the year on the box, send it offsite, and, after seven years, physically destroy it. In today’s world it’s all automated and based on business rules. The document is digitally stored and at the end of seven years it’s flagged so you can present a document destruction certificate to your records administrator. If the company’s not involved in a lawsuit and the SEC isn’t breathing down your neck, the document is destroyed—not with an offsite document shredder—but expunged by software in a legally compliant manner. The automated system won’t let you destroy documents you shouldn’t, and makes sure you destroy what should be destroyed—within the law."

Protecting Records in Every Industry
While the emphasis and techniques vary, critical legacy documents are being scanned and digitally managed in every sector.

Public education is a paper-intensive field that’s increasingly vulnerable to litigation. As a result, improving efficiencies and access to student records, and preventing litigation depend on digitally managing student records. "You’re starting to see a move to digitization in the public sector. Schools and government agencies have huge back-file conversion requirements—especially schools that have to store K-12 student records from 50 years to forever," says Dave Zuhlke, marketing manager for Education/Public Sector, Océ Digital Document Systems.

Antioch Community High School in Illinois once stored all of its student records in a dusty basement room in cardboard boxes. Whenever records had to be accessed, an administrator would have to brave the storage room to physically search for records. "Our Digital Educational Records system to make it easy to locate, access, retrieve, update, and re-file records," Zuhlke explains. "We developed a customized TIFF driver and automatic indexing software to automate retrieval, developed an electronic filing cabinet, and set up another electronic filing cabinet for transcripts to comply with the federally-mandated 65-year storage period."

Zuhlke concludes, "Today, Antioch’s hard copy records are scanned, preserved, and integrated with digital information through an automated process, and the school’s evaluating our Special Education Program to automate management of special education records—a paper-intensive process that puts a huge burden on staff, educators, and budgets."

Scanning technology is transforming processes at healthcare facilities like Atlanta’s Piedmont Hospital. "When a patient was admitted, the registration staff would copy the patient’s driver’s license and insurance card and later key the insurance information into a hospital database, keeping the original file for verification purposes," says John Capurso, VP of Enterprise Marketing for Xerox Visioneer.

Capurso adds, "When the hospital filed a claim that was denied or rejected, the business office would have to track down the original copy of the insurance card or license to correct the claim—a time-consuming, inconvenient process."

Piedmont installed a Visioneer Strobe XP200 scanner right in the patient registration area. By scanning insurance and identification documents at the front end and creating an accessible-from-anywhere image, Piedmont reduced registration time by two to three hours a day.

Business process efficiency is a major driver for electronic records management initiatives. "We have a customer in the entertainment business that’s using scanning technology to automate its accounts payable department," Paradiso states. "They were using a paper-based system to move documents through the department. When a check was issued, carbon copies of the check, invoice, and other documents were stored on microfilm and destroyed when the film was verified. The manual system was slow and there were issues with lost or missing invoices."

Today the mail staff uses AnyDoc software to automatically process invoices, reading key index information such as vendor name, invoice number, amount, and date into the DM system. The workflow automatically directs data and images through the approval and payment process. The next phase is a back-file conversion of all AP documents stored on microfilm using a SunRise S2500 production scanner.

Capturing, Digitizing, and Archiving Wide Format
The use of large format scanners to capture, digitize, and archive architectural drawings, engineering documents, and municipal plans in CAD, AEC, and GIS environments is on the rise as well.

The New York City Department of Environmental Protection handles all water and sewer activities for the city. According to Smooth Solutions’ Harris, "As part of a citywide GIS effort, the agency contracted with us to capture all water and sewer plans—more than 160,000 drawings and plans—that had to be scanned at five borough offices. We brought six Vidar and Contex scanners on-site to capture the drawings, indexed the scanned images, and brought them into the ESRI ArcInfo GIS archiving system. We also scanned two million images of water tap records, captured them as color jpegs, indexed them with more than ten fields of information, and linked each card to the geo-coded location in the GIS system. Today everything’s electronic, backed up, and easily accessible."

Ana Versaggi, product marketing manager, Océ Wide Format Printing Systems, adds, "One of our customers, a municipal agency for a large city, had hundreds of thousands of large format drawings that were up to 100 years old and accessed daily by engineers, contractors, and maintenance personnel. They actually had boxes of drawings labeled with the name of the engineer who had created them. If the engineer was no longer there, it could take days to locate a drawing. The agency did a back file conversion in-house using temps, an Océ TDS600 scanner, an Océ TDS800 for printing, and Océ Engineering Exec software for indexing and archiving. The conversion project improved efficiency and saved the customer more than $100,000."

"Even clients who have their documents on microfilm need to ensure the safety of those documents through digitization," said Tim Hunsinger, president of Scanning America, a Kansas-based conversion services provider. "In addition to anticipating catastrophes and natural disasters, some older film is subject to deterioration. We regularly scan millions of pages of micro-filmed records for county governments that have to maintain land records indefinitely, and for state and federal agencies that used microfilm for disaster recovery years ago. We use the nextScan Eclipse scanner to convert these records quickly at a time where preservation is critical."

The State of Texas initiated a similar project. "The Texas General Land Office had historical maps that went back to the early 1800s. They were fragile, old, deteriorating—but extremely valuable," says Randy Geesman, president of Paradigm Imaging Group. "We undertook a preservation project to archive the information digitally so that people doing ancestral research, attorneys researching rights of ownership, and historians looking for reprints of old maps could access them online. We used Epson, Vidar, and Contex scanners to digitize 80,000 maps and historical documents, creating a terabyte of data that’s now backed up in a vault. Today, the state of Texas posts thumbnails of the maps for viewing and purchasing reprints over the Web. "

Gary Gibson, owner of The Vintage Poster in California uses a ColorTrac 4860 large format scanner to digitize turn-of-the-century stone lithographs. "These posters are extremely valuable pieces of art valued at up to $30,000 or more. Once they’re purchased, they’re permanently removed from the public view. We create backup copies by scanning them to a 500 GB hard drive, and then transfer the digital records to DVD. Many of the posters are printed on wood pulp paper that tears, disintegrates, and falls apart. With the scanner we can essentially restore the poster to its original condition to create an intact digital archive that lasts forever."

The Requirements
What does it take to successfully digitize records? Szemplinski surmises, "An effective enterprise content management system consists of three key elements. First, there’s data and image capture, which includes scanning, indexing, and classifying information using small, portable scanners, robust MFPs, and high-speed production scanners. Second, there’s content management, the engine that provides workflow and repository capabilities. And the third element is storage devices—from optical storage devices to storage area networks and content storage devices."

The level of effort required? It all depends. "Document scanning comes in two flavors," says Harris, "back-filing and day-forward scanning. A back-file conversion is a one-time event that helps to populate an electronic content management system with valuable historical data and images. Back-filing enables enterprises to start getting their return-on-investment from an enterprise content management system by making critical documents available for immediate retrieval and distribution. Back-filing can be outsourced to an experienced scanning and conversion service bureau. Day-forward scanning, depending on quantities, can be performed by purchasing and implementing the proper scanning hardware and software."

Szemplinski agrees. "Some of our clients go into a conversion project thinking there’s only value if they scan back to the beginning plus everything going forward. But there are many ways to skin a cat. You can outsource the entire function so you don’t have to ramp up on equipment or people. You can bring in temps. You can scan two years back. Or you can digitize records going forward. Whatever you do, we recommend a phased pilot approach versus the big bang theory. Rather than turning the company upside down, choose a couple of obvious pain points, train people so they understand the big picture, architect a roadmap, and implement a pilot scaled back in terms of complexity and resources. When the pilot’s complete, you have a proof of concept you can take to senior management to demonstrate how the rest of the organization can gain the same efficiencies."

Celebrating 15 years in digital document imaging and the number one market share position in mid- and high-volume production scanner segments worldwide, Kodak also sees the value in offering hardware that can grow with its users. Launched in May alongside the new Kodak i55 and i65 desktop scanners, the i610 is a B&W-only duplex scanner that can be upgraded to meet customers’ needs. The i610 can be ramped up as budget allows and needs arise, with added speed and color scanning ability. "Kodak is responding to our customers’ desire to buy what they need when they need it," states Roger Markham, marketing manager, Kodak Document Imaging.

The Future of Digital Records Management
Where’s it all headed? InfoTrends CAP Ventures’ Moyse concludes, "From my perspective document scanning and imaging used to be limited to document-intensive industries like financial services, insurance, healthcare, legal, manufacturing, and utilities. Now it’s ubiquitous across departments common to all industries—accounting, legal, operations, MIS, HR, sales, the mailroom. A lot has to do with the technology itself. Scanning was once expensive, centralized, and required a trained operator. Now anyone can walk up to a device, touch a keypad, get instant feedback on an image, and enhance it. Yes, people are generating more paper than ever. But, they’re also digitizing more paper than ever. Will we conceivably ever let paper go? I don’t know. But, if we do, it’s at least 50 years away. In the meantime, expect to see lots of companies using scanners to manage their records over the next decade."