To take on the data entry responsibility or outsource the process is what we’ll discuss today.
While if you’ve got an ongoing inbound flow of paper that needs to be somehow transcribed to a database, data capture is for you for sure. Unless the documents have hand writing (hand printing is no problem). Same goes for any backlog of documents you may have in storage on or off site. If you’re paying for the storage (and you always are) you might want to consider getting the data off the paper and destroying the paper. You’ll get faster access to the data and never lose control of the content and you’ll likely automatically become compliant to most industry regulations that you work with.
If however you consider that data entry is only the start of an internal process, you’ll begin to realize how much time it takes to collect data and how complex it could be. Content comes into the organizations from many sources including (but not limited to) physical paper from multiple collection points (mail, courier, manual collection, scanning), faxes, digital attachments in emails, and EDI (Electronic Data Interchange).
If you’re collecting a lot of data on a regular basis from a lot of forms, it may make financial sense to purchase a solution to capture and manage the form changes and move the data integrations along to the other internal systems. If however, your needs are either occasional, seasonal or you don’t want to allocate staff to managing the various internal infrastructure processes to ensure 100% uptime – you might want to consider outsourcing the entire process. After all the primary product of using a form is the data that’s produced. You could use a data capture service that would collect all the data, manage form changes quickly, produce the look and feel that you’d expect and even host the form or have the form appear as though its’ running on your site – and the data is produced fast and only for you. No fuss, no effort, just results. But of course a service fee is applied for the effort, but you can usually add or remove service capabilities quickly without being responsible to make the changes work yourself. For instance, we could perform email mail merges on your behalf to push out results or PDF forms or containing links to online eforms, submit and receive faxes automatically without having to bare the fees of purchasing, upgrading, maintaining these systems over time.
The capturing of the data from a paper based form is likely only the starting point for the process. Additional requirements could require faxing services and document management storage services – all of which can be online and accessible from anywhere. This way all content that’s captured from the forms can be sent and received as well as automatically stored in a document management system that can kick off another process for you as well as archive the captured metadata and an image of the original form or document that was processed. All without lifting a finger – it’s all in the setup!
While outsourcing data capture services isn’t for all companies, you will be able to write off 100% of the fees against your operational budgets, whereas a capital purchase would hit your GL in an entirely different way. Outsourcing enables your organisation to focus on its core competency while reducing labour and acquisition and maintenance costs for new technologies.
Connectis Group 