Looking for Low Cost Document Digitization?

Are we making the right choice in choosing low-cost digitization?

Allow me to explain…When was the last time you used film-based traditional camera to click photographs? Do you remember the effort you needed to put in to utilize those 36 frames efficiently?

Thanks to the introduction of digital cameras, we can now click as many pictures as we want and select the best. The introduction of digital technology has brought numerous features that we seldom use. Just think – have you ever used all the features of a digital camera to get the best picture, or have you simply set it on auto mode and enjoyed the photography? I am sure the most used feature of digital photography is “Auto Shoot Mode”. So why do digital cameras have so many features? Have you ever thought about why superstars/models look great on posters? Do you believe that all of them are actually so perfect looking? It’s all about photography skills. Why can’t we achieve that quality with the photos we shoot? Just ask any professional photographer to share some tricks and look for the wonders.

If automatic mode on a digital camera could give you the best results, then every school kid could be a professional photographer. But that’s not true. I have visited many organizations and customers looking for automation and digitization of huge amounts of important documents, but they are rarely concerned about the quality of the scanned output; their understanding is that if a paper comes out of the scanner, then that’s it, scanning is done. If you give them a digital camera, they will put all efforts to get a professional photograph, but when it comes to the digitization of critical/important documents that drive their businesses, they behave like a school kid wanting to get professional scanning through automatic mode. That’s how low-cost digitization vendors earn their profits.

Isn’t it necessary to emphasize the digitization process and quality rather than just Document Management Software?

Just imagine what will happen if you retrieve a scanned image using the best Document Management System and find it to be a poor-quality image, which is of no use. In this case, even the best Document Management Platform will fail to suffice your requirements. With our research, we have found that the cost variation between low-quality digitization and ideal digitization is very low – only about 10%. But, to save 10% of the initial cost organizations generally take a risk on the rest 90% of the project cost. We came across various large organizations (not ethical to name them) that spent in rescanning documents three to four times the money they saved with low-cost digitization.

Today, the actual cost of resources is easily verifiable in the market. When manpower, computers, scanners, etc. cost the same for every digitization vendor then how come certain vendors are able to offer low costs for digitization? It is not efficiency but the shortcuts they follow, like auto mode of scanning of different kinds of documents, selective quality checks, loose inventory reconciliation, human errors, etc. One thing I am not able to understand is how selective quality checks ensure the accuracy of large-volume digitization. It is also well known that unskilled manpower (specially batching, scanning, and quality check operators) lack the technical expertise to handle such tasks. A qualified operator will not perform such a low-category unskilled laborious job. I also do not understand how they control huge teams of 100 to 200 operators working on the digitization floor independently. There are more than 50 digitization settings that ensure good quality scanning, such as image name, orientation, brightness, contrast, darkness, skew, resolution, color depth, readability, torn edges/corners, black edges, file size, streaks, image margin, punch marks, image dimension, compression etc. We cannot expect an operator to manually take care of all these scanning parameters and that too for huge volumes of documents.

That is the reason why the cost of digitization is high for vendors who specialize in digitization. They use proven software like a production control management system (to control large teams of unskilled operators through software) and Document Quality Analyzer to ensure 100% desired quality through 100% software-based scrutiny. At last, I suggest it is wise to invest 10% more cost on digitization to protect 90% of the project cost and join the league of successful organizations, as it is not possible to get Mercedes Benz for the cost of TATA Nano unless you get it in the lottery.