Outsourcing Document Management

It's no secret that companies of all sizes in all industries are creating and storing more documents, in more formats, than ever before, driven partly by regulatory and compliance pressures. In order to streamline the process of storing and accessing documents, many organizations have moved to digitize their files. The benefits of e-documents include improved control and compliance, quicker access to information and greater processing efficiencies that drive cost savings.

Yet even as documents go digital, most companies also maintain paper records of these same documents. This hybrid creates a costly, inefficient and fragmented mish-mash of digital and paper documents located on site or off, managed by a myriad of third-party document management providers. This hybrid world of paper and digital document management will exist for years, probably decades. That's because organizations, particularly very large ones, tend to make the digital transition very slowly, department by department. It's rarely a wholesale conversion.

How do you manage paper documents stretching back years while building and managing a digital document storage infrastructure for the future? For many, the answer is partnering with a company with expertise in both paper and digital document management.

Outsourcing companies of late have taken a broader view of information management to oversee the entire lifecycle of a document. This includes being involved in records management from the moment the record is created, conversion of the document from print to digital format, storage of the paper and electronic document, providing access to it and, finally, destruction of the document.

Companies with feet in both paper and digital document management are best positioned to help organizations make the transition. There is extraordinary value in outsourcing the management of the complete information lifecycle in this hybrid world.

Indeed, in this economic climate, most organizations need to spend time and resources on their core competencies, not scanning documents and managing file rooms. Full-service information management companies provide not only storage and quick retrieval of paper and e-documents but conversion from paper to digital.

Why should CIOs take the risk and incur the expense of outsourcing document scanning to one company, archival storage to another, active storage to another and document transportation to yet another company?

Digitization is driving this trend. Customers are asking for it because they're looking to work with fewer vendors and provide management for the entire lifecycle.

Outsourcing partners can offer a complete array of services to manage documents from creation to destruction and every step in between. Here are the highlights:

• Intelligent Scanning/Conversion. When organizations digitize documents internally, they're often tempted to scan each and every document, which is expensive and usually unnecessary. Most archived documents are not time sensitive and will never even be accessed. Further, it's frequently the case that only a portion of a document needs to be converted to digital format. For example, perhaps only 10 percent of a mortgage document is unique and needs to be stored and available for retrieval while 90 percent of the document is boilerplate contract information. Knowing what to scan is an important step in streamlining the process. Customers can save 25 percent or more by scanning only what they need, only when they need it.
• Image-on-Demand. For those paper documents with low retrieval needs, Image-on-Demand service can deliver these documents as needed. The documents are retrieved from an archive, scanned and delivered to users either via e-mail, direct upload or secure hosted archive.
• Hosted Repository. For many companies, there is little value in building and supporting an in-house image repository. Digital Record Centers for Images can provide users with secure access to their archive via a Web browser, all on a pay-as-you-go basis, for under $1,000 a month. Alternatively, the hosted archive can work within customers’ existing Enterprise Content Management (ECM) system to provide access to electronic documents via the existing solution, or documents can be directly uploaded into the ECM system.
• Managing Active Physical and Virtual File Rooms. If your business process is now electronic, why pay for expensive real estate and distract from your core focus by managing file rooms? You can instead outsource your active files to professional records managers in a purpose-built facility, receiving secure and immediate access to documents electronically.
• Security. Outsourcers can also provide a very tight chain of custody. Solutions can protect documents in transit with locking mechanisms, vehicle alarms with driver proximity controls, dual-ignition immobilizers and in-motion security detection. Further, these solutions can maintain a real-time audit trail to document transactions as documents are routed through the system. For customers, this means far less risk that data will be lost or stolen.

Further, information management companies that offer a broad range of enterprise content management (ECM) solutions can work with customers to implement the technology that best suits their needs, rather than promote a one-size-fits-all "solution."

In addition to the cost benefits of outsourcing document management (which can be considerable), there are other business benefits worth noting.

One is a partner who can also provide document destruction. This is important from an efficiency and cost perspective. Why should a company pay to keep documents that are no longer needed? One example is a mortgage. When a mortgage has been paid off, the document can be transferred to archival storage and assigned a destruction date consistent with banking rules. This helps content owners manage customer and other documents more effectively because they're not bogged down with unnecessary paper.

Other benefits of outsourcing the entire document lifecycle include:

• reduction of paper storage costs
• no capital investment in scanning technology
• better-quality scanning
• reduction in an error-prone manual process
• reduction of lost documents
• quick online access to documents previously available only on paper, microfilm or microfiche
• better control over documents and business process

Major industries like healthcare will likely be at the forefront of outsourcing the management of their paper and digital information. A move has been underway for several years to digitize health records, a move that got a bigger push earlier this year when the U.S. government, as part of the $787 billion American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (a.k.a. the economic stimulus plan), said it plans to provide incentives to physicians to adopt electronic health records. So committed is the government to promoting e-health that it will actually reduce Medicare payments to doctors who do not use electronic records.

The bottom line is this: companies large and small, public and private, need fast and reliable access to their active and inactive documents, regardless of their location or format. For larger organizations, document management can be a tangled web of print and digital documents located in various locations managed by internal and external staff. This is not the desired scenario when needing to find a document, and fast.

An integrated document management solution, managed by a single vendor, helps break down the walls between paper and digital documents while cutting costs and reducing risk.

In this distressed economic climate, at least two things are true: one is that information is power. Document management solutions help provide business leaders with information they need to make the best decisions. Second, companies can't afford to waste precious internal resources on functions that don't sustain or grow the business.

Outsourcing the management of both inactive and active documents, in particular the transition from paper to digital, helps companies streamline the business process.

Chris Churchill is Vice President of Document Management Solutions (DMS) at Iron Mountain, and oversees the development and management of the Company’s DMS business line. This line includes Active File Solutions, Document Conversion and the Digital Records Center for Images. For more information, please visit: storeaccessmanage.com.