Many organisations accrue documents at an alarming rate. In some cases they accumulate slowly over time, as a part of normal business; in others they may arrive suddenly, perhaps as a consequence of an acquisition or merger. Whatever the reason, a point is reached where the documents in their current form do not meet the needs of the business, and conversion to another format becomes desirable.

Examples of such scenarios include:

• Retrieval of documents is not quick enough, perhaps to meet the needs of customer services staff or regulators. Immediate access to document images would bring huge benefits;
• The documents are aging, and the regular retrievals, handling and refiling is causing deterioration which could result in information loss;
• The documents are bulky, and expensive to store – often in prime office buildings which would be better used to accommodate staff;
• Microfilmed documents, which are difficult to share and distribute. This drawback also applies to paper filing;
• The documents have real value to the business, and some insurance against loss due to fire, flood, theft or other disaster is required;
• Documents which were digitised using technology - applications, formats or media - which are now unsupported or unreliable.

Many more scenarios may also be encountered, and EDM Group has probably met them all. We can convert your documents, whatever their current storage medium or format, into a form which better meets the needs of your organisation. In the majority of cases this involves scanning paper documents to digital image format. However, we also convert documents to film formats, and digital documents to industry-standard formats. Our Case Studies include examples of companies whose business has been transformed by EDM Group’s scanning and document conversion services.

High Volume Backfile Scanning

We can take archives of accumulated documents, transport them to our facilities, in batch sizes to meet the constraints of your business, and convert them to digital image format. With an annual capacity of over 750 million pages, no job is too large for us to accommodate.

Our state of the art scanning equipment and indexing capabilities mean that your organisation can be free of its paper and working digitally more quickly and less expensively than you ever imagined. Your images can be returned to you in a variety of media, from CD to our online hosted solution EDM online, or delivered directly into your own image repository.

Regular Document Scanning

To bring the advantages of digital working to current and active documents, EDM Group offers a regular scanning service. This can be daily, weekly or at other suitable intervals. Documents can be collected, or sent direct to the EDM Group, where they will be scanned and made available as images to staff who need to access them.

Our regular scanning service avoids the need to locate documents close to operational staff, where they accumulate and become costly to maintain and store, and are at risk of damage or loss in the event of a disaster. For the ultimate in efficiency, you may consider our outsourced Mailroom service, and eliminate paper-based working almost entirely.

Scan-on-Demand

In some cases, a large archive of documents can not justifiably be scanned in its entirety. Perhaps the retrieval rate is too low, or the archive is vast and would be very expensive to scan. However, this does not mean it is doomed to be forever maintained and used as a paper store.

EDM Group offers a highly cost-effective Scan-on-Demand service. Put simply we take away your pain and return images of your documents!

• We will collect and safely store your documents in our box storage accommodation.
• Customers simply request documents they wish to access. The request can be e-mailed, faxed, or - best of all – submitted via our secure EDM online portal.

We will scan the documents and return them to the requester in the required format, and to an agreed service level.

Because we only scan what you need to view, the service is outstandingly cost-effective. Your documents can be on paper, microfilm or microfiche, or a mixture of media types. Users have all the benefits of image-based working, such as anywhere:anytime access and easy document sharing AND have the additional benefit that the space where their documents used to be stored becomes free, with all the savings that can bring.

Now that’s win-win!

Microfilm Scanning Services

Microfilm and microfiche are well-established media for the compact storage of documents, but when compared to digital imaging, they are far less easy to retrieve and share.

EDM Group offers rapid and cost effective services to scan filmed documents to image format, making them easy to view, email, share and use. We can convert large archives, or host the film for you and deliver images as a scan-on-demand service – the choice is yours.

Book Scanning Services

Many organisations store vital information in bound books. These books are frequently the only copy of the information, which may be immensely valuable. As a result the information is at risk of loss or damage which means that access often has to be restricted and information sharing becomes very difficult. Examples of this include public information such as birth, marriages and death records, cemetery records and museum artefacts, and also commercial information, such as research records, property files, ledgers and many other types of books.

EDM Group uses specialist book scanning hardware, software and handling techniques to scan books without the need to de-bind the documents. The originals are therefore not damaged, and the resulting images eliminate the risk of data loss and make it easy for anyone who needs access to the information to view it - anywhere in the world, at any time. Contact us now to find out more.