One example of an industry that has used document scanning and electronic document management systems to save time and money is the freight business. Freight processing can really be a handful. And if you’re freight company cannot do an efficient job, there’s no reason why your customers should stick with you. In your defense, you've been doing the best you can with what you have to work with. Unfortunately, if you want to be a big fish in the cargo industry, what you’re doing won’t cut it.

You've gotten by dealing with tons of paperwork every day. But, how long can you keep doing this before your office becomes a pool of filing cabinets? Don’t wait until that happens. Right now, outsource a company that can handle your freight processes with ease. They scan all your paperwork in hours and extracts the data into your management system. Not only will this benefit your daily business operations, but it will benefit both your employees and customers too.

Freight Processing Management Systems

There are several freight processes that can be really time-consuming. If you’re still not using a streamlined system, your employees will spend countless hours on tasks that can be efficiently completed using a specific system. Here are a few samples of freight processing management systems that can help your company go paperless:

• Vendor Claims. A vendor claim management system will help in filing vendor claims. With the software, vendor claims can easily become freight claims. Filing vendor claims are quite tedious and your employees will be happy that they’d only use a computer to complete these tasks.
• Freight Claim. This freight processing management system will help in filing freight claims efficiently. The use of the streamlined system eliminates the need to record things twice as you simply type in the data. It also eliminates any confusion in making cargo and freight claims. Further, the software helps in making sure all data fields are filled up as well as help prevent missing deadlines thanks to the automatic reporting and scheduling.
• Returns. Freight companies always deal with shipping returns and handling this issue can be tiresome as well. By using the freight processing management system, the freight company can improve customer service and guarantee speedy processing of returns. It also helps connect customers to the company’s distribution centers.
• Processing documents. The presence of paperwork slows down response time and turnaround time. Employees have to manually check the paperwork to get the information they need. If every document is made digital, data can be accessed within seconds, thus, completing office work faster.

Look for a company that can provide you a freight processing management system and other tools that you need to run your freight company the most efficient way possible.

Be Productive Systems has released their process control system for the document scanning industry. The system is called production manager. The system took two years to design and code. It is a cloud based solution.

The company reports that their system increased scanning throughput by 77%. This was coupled with a decrease of labor costs of 7%. These would be welcome gains for any scanning service bureau.

The industry has moved from the days of dramatic hardware improvements to those now available via software. Employees need to be as comfortable with a screen as with scotch tape.  This trend will only grow over the next decade.

Many of us have amassed large libraries of books over the years. Most avid readers have at least one book reader. The convenience of having several books in one little device is a convenience that causes many people to give up their paper books for electronic versions.

The question that many people ask is if they can convert all of their paper books so they can have a copy on their e-book reader. It seems to make sense on its face but copyright laws are very murky and there is no clear answer. At one time a book can be copyrighted for 15 years and then it would go into the public domain. Over the years the window has expanded as big media companies have lobbied congress to keep adding years to the end. Unless something significant changes in Washington you can expect all books controlled by large media companies to never go into the public domain.

The applicable part of the copyright law is Title 17. Also referred to as "fair use." Scanning is in effect a copy of the work so that is the section of the law that is most commonly used as a basis for legal decisions. Fair use allows for copying of writings for the private study, scholarship, and research. So the first hurdle is that it is not for commercial use.

There are also limitations on how much can be copied. It does allow for a chapter of a book or a the whole book if it is not available at a "fair price." Fair price is generally considered books that are unavailable or out of print. This would seem to exclude books that you could get at the local bookstore or Amazon.

Since we don't have the powerful lawyers to defend the copying of books in copyright we only offer scanning of books when they are out of print or if you own the copyright.

If you would like more information about copyright law then check out the fair use resources at Stanford.

The town of Swansea, Massachusetts is seeking $29,000 from taxpayers to improve the towns records management system. The money would cover cleaning up the current records storage area and set up a digital management system .

Currently the town has all the boxes in a room that was not designed to store records. It is missing the environmental controls and there is evidence that some records have been damaged by water and animals. Some of the records dating to the 1600s have been moved into an office to help protect them.

Paper has a long life span but it will deteriorate if not protected from humidity and temperature extremes. Older paper is of a much higher quality than we use today. Historical documents like the ones maintained by the town of Swansea deserve to be protected from water and animals. They have not be digitized and once destroyed they are lost forever.

Businesses have the same problem with the documents that they must maintain. They should be protected from animals and moisture. The best way to handle that is to build out a dedicated record storage area. Alternatively you can look to an outsourced records storage provider.

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Graycliff Partners has announced the sale of Information Storage Consolidation Company (ISCC) to Iron Mountain. Graycliff is a private equity group with offices in New York and Sao Paulo.

ISCC was headquartered in Carrollton, Texas with locations throughout the Southern and Midwestern United States. They offered physical document storage along with paper shredding and document scanning.

This type of transaction is becoming more common in the document management industry. A private equity group will buy several independent records storage companies. The goal is to get a geographic footprint over a region. Once they reach a critical mass they are sold to an existing national player.

Iron Mountain must be paying a premium for these locations for Graycliff to earn their expected return. It is unclear whether it is easier to integrate several locations that have been assembled by the equity group. If they had integrated systems over all the locations it would make the increased costs in the sale of the company offset by integration costs.

Customers should be wary of outsourcing their documents to a firm with transitional ownership. Make sure you can get out of any contract if the company is sold. The worst case scenario is the contract changes hands and now your prices are increased and permanent withdrawal fees added in. You are now hostage to a company that had just bought your business but not invested in win-win relationship.

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Google has announced an upgrade for their android app that allows for document scanning on the go. With any android device that has installed the Google Drive app, a user can take a picture of a document and have it uploaded to their Google Drive account. The software will do the optical character recognition (OCR) on the document and allow the user to edit the document.

This is a neat solution when dealing with low volume scanning. It can be used to keep track of receipts for your expense report on the go. You could also keep track of other expenses that you might be need to file your tax return. Then at the end of the year just send over the file to your accountant.

But perhaps the best use is to take pictures of documents very discreetly. While you do the pictures hum the James Bond theme to yourself. Now we can all pretend we are getting the top secret tank plans from the safe of the ambassador.

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The goal for many businesses is to have all their information in a digital format. The challenge is not just eliminating the paper but capturing the information. It is fairly straight forward to take a paper document and scan it on to a disk. The expertise is managing the conversion so it is now a useful information and not just another dead format.

Ideally data capture would all be done with software. Unfortunately, there is still a great deal that a human can do better and more efficiently than software. This is where data entry comes in to play. An outsourcing firm can index your documents and key in any relevant information that would make the documents more useful.

There are a few reasons why outsourcing data entry makes sense.

1. The most obvious is cost. An outsourcing firm has the systems in place to keep costs at a minimum. They don't need to ramp up for any particular project with additional computer hardware or desks.
2. The second is speed. An outsourcing firm can put an army of people on your job very quickly. Once your job is set up it is going with a high rate of indexing. This limits the amount of time working with two different sets of data. The fear is having to look in two places for the document you need or not know which one is the master.
3. Accuracy is always important. This is your valuable company information. It needs to be handled with care. The data being entered into your system must be done with an absolute minimum of errors. Professional data entry companies work with people who specialize in this type of work. You don't need to waste management time to supervise to project.

So think beyond a stack of CDs with your electronic documents. Think about the most useful way to use the information they contain. Many companies now scan in all their forms and invoices as they come in to the office. A data entry / data capture firm then indexes the documents and puts them into an electronic document management system. This can be done in hours if needed. Now the paper doesn't even need to pile up in a record storage room.

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