Purchase orders, customer contract documents, bid documents, cost worksheets, drawings and test reports for each project were filed in 4 inch binders. About 100 such binders covered one complete wall of the project operations office. Project managers needed to both quickly retrieve the required documents and also be able to share the drawings and other technical specifications with their field engineers.
All the pages within the binders were scanned and indexed based on project name and type of document. Access to the scanned paper images was provided through a document management system so when customers called for specific project name or type of documents these images were available instantly. All scanning was done at 300 dpi, Black & White with PDF digital files generated for each project.
The Savings Came From:
Retrieval Costs
Even though all project folders were located within project operations considerable time was spent by administrative staff, engineers,project managers to search for and retrieve these documents.
Space Savings
The cabinets housing the projects binders as well as the space needed around the cabinets to be able to access and pull down the binders. Once the scanning was complete all this space was freed up.
Cabinets
In this case all the cabinets were sold. In other instances it saves a possible outlay of funds to purchase more cabinets to store more documents
Reduction of mis-filing, lost documents
Once scanning was done this eliminated the mis-filing or any chance of loss of documents. Paper documents get misfiled and lost. More time is spent looking for incorrectly filed or lost papers.
Work flow savings
Again once scanning was completed it eliminated the need for spending time on filing. The scan images were instantly available for sharing between departments. Further productivity improvement was realized due to the document management system.