For years the concept of a paperless office has seemed to always be just on the horizon, just out of touching distance and just not practical enough to be useful. That has already started to change and the reason for such a change can be attributed to at least two major trends: the proliferation of increasingly inexpensive storage systems and the availability of high quality document imaging scanners at reasonable price points. The combination of high quality digital document imaging scanners and affordable storage systems essentially allows for one thing: extremely efficient document centralization.

Consider a paper filing system for medical office as an example. The system is probably very intricate and occupies a great deal of prime office real estate that could potentially be put to more productive use if records were not so important. However, the fact is that those records are vital to business, and many other businesses also have to dedicate a large portion of office space to their document storage systems.

When anyone in the office needs to look at a document or file a document they have to get up, walk over to the filing center and start searching. The result could be several wasted seconds or perhaps even a few wasted moments each and every time. The more employees that use the document filing system and the more often they use the document filing system, the more time is wasted on any given workday. That time adds up when it comes time to prepare quarterly and annual reports.

Now compare this to an office where a small server hosts all of those same documents in a digital format. A worker simply types in a name, and presto! The file is at their terminal ready for review. Adding new documents with custom software keeps the library up to date while easily allowing searches for old records. The amount of time saved will eventually pay for the initial cost of the storage system/server, document imaging scanner and all the hours required to transfer the data from a paper format to a digital format.

As an added bonus, digital data can be backed up and taken off site far easier than physical records. In fact, there are services that can automate such backups between different sites that are worth looking into for anyone using document imaging scanners to create a complete archive of their important documents.

Because records are very vital, they must be very readable when they are scanned. This requires two things: storage capacity and a quality document imaging scanning system. Shrinking files to accommodate storage limitations is likely to result in poor image quality, which is a highly undesirable trait in a document. Of course, the image has to be scanned in using a high quality document imaging scanner or that quality may be low due to concerns related to the quality and capability of the scanner and not the storage system.