Capturing a back file of drawings or documents goes well beyond the process of scanning them into a compressed digital raster image. Storing them as intelligent records on fast and reliable electronic media is a goal that can save valuable time and resources for your company. Planning and justifying this step is the first and most critical step in the process of moving your valued assets into digital assets.

The benefit of an indexed and organized digital back file is that users find them in a fraction of time compared to traditional manual methods. This paper explores the considerations and some components for implementing a scanning and digital archiving and management solution within your organization.

Sizing up the situation

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You don't always have a handle on the quantities and size breakouts of your legacy archives but can usually provide ballpark estimates to help in planning throughput and storage needs. Be sure to consider what the target resolution is for each scanned object type, percentage of duplex documents for office documents, average number of pages, compression factors and understand average file sizes at varying resolutions. This can be modeled to give an idea of the pages to scan and storage capacity needs for the given population of back file records.

Scanner Throughput Calculation

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When you're ready to select a scanner to handle your target needs, you need to consider efficiency factors and traditional parameters to determine the true scanning throughput required. The expected scanner efficiency is the amount of up time for the scanner when considering paper jams, preventive maintenance (cleaning), and repair times of the scanner. The more important and dynamic factor is the operator efficiency. How much of an operators time is spent scanning as opposed to preparations, indexing, and other job functions. This environment is modeled in the following analyzer where the variables can be altered to help identify the impact of variations of your situation.