We have loads of documents onsite - usual sales invoices, supplier invoices, delivery notes etc and storing them is becoming a pain.

What we thought of doing is to look at having these documents scanned and then stored "on-line" so they could be accessed at any time in the future from anywhere in the world - ideal if our building ever burned down!

Now my question is can anyone recommend any company to talk to about this - both for scanning the documents and then storing them on-line?

Silly question but what kind of quantity are we talking about?

Well on Sales Invoices - per month around 5,000. Supplier invoices probably 450-600 per month, delivery notes - again around 5,000 mark - at the moment these get stapled to a copy of the sales invoice so they would look at having both the invoice and delivery note scanned as 1 document.

sales invoices you can output to a pdf printer to avoid having to scan them back in.

Sharepoint would be great for storing it on however unless someone wants the job of manually scanning it you'll need a document management system which wouldn't be cheap.

we use this company's dms:

http://www.instate.co.uk/

its fairly basic but works very well. We scan approx 20k pages a month.

I'm not sure about on-line access - you would have to talk to them.

If you call them ask for Roger .. he knows his stuff.

Didge

I was looking into this at my last job. ELO is big (Electronic Leitz Office - Leitz are the people who invented the Lever Arch file and are moving into the electronic age). In Germany they work with Xerox for integrated solutions.

With a large Xeorx copier, you can scan directly into the ELO archive and it is read-only, so that they are legal documents (at least here in Germany).

d.Velop's d3 is excellent and integrates better into Windows Vista and Windows 7 search and start menu enhancements, but I don't know what the state of their English version is - it is a German company.

If you go to the big printer/copier manufacturers, they all have a print and scan solution, which can be integrated with a DMS system. Minolta Konica will do a full analysis and come up with a price per page printing solution, plus DMS system, Xerox, Triumph Adler (Kyocera) also offer the same service.

You pay for the DMS licences and they provide the printers/copiers on a cost per page basis for printing - Xerox provide only colour devices, but up to 5% colour on a page is counted as a black and white page, for example, and you can usually get it for a small monthly sum, plus 1c per page.

The solutions are very nice as well. You generally have a central printer driver, which works for all printers in the organisation, so no more driver problems. You can have security code printing - the job stays in the queue until the user turns up at a printer and either places a smart card on the device or enters a PIN code (the same in reverse for scanning, use the card/pin and the scanner offers the user's folders / department folders on the DMS system for auto scanning). You can also scan to e-mail or fax and print to fax from the desktop.

There are certainly lots of options out there.

The Xerox system is very smart, but I think the TA and Minolta systems are more popular, at least on the printing side, but that could be a cost thing. Unfortunately, my old boss looked at the several thousand square feet of cellar space and said we didn't need an electronic archiving system (even if it was more efficient and cost effective, in terms of employee time searching for documents), so I never got around to getting quotes...

We got the xerox system in to demo .. the instate system beat it hands down and was much cheaper.

It was about 7 years ago now though.

Didge