How to Speed Up Digital Transformation for Document Management?
Whether it is for sustainability reasons or just for the sake of an improved workflow, document digitalization has almost become inevitable. However, even in such a technology-driven world, it is safe to say that a lot of businesses still haven’t gone completely digital.
So, how can we make this process of digital transformation faster and more convenient? In this article, we will talk about a few methods for digitization and then show you the best ways to implement them.
So, if you aim to improve your company’s document management, this article will provide highly valuable insights to you. So, let’s get started.
Table of Contents
Digital Vs. Traditional Document Management
Before we discuss the problem in detail, let’s show you how the two mediums of document management differ. In this section, we compare paper-based and electronic document management.
Traditional Documentation
The traditional documentation method usually depends heavily on papers, files, books, and whatnot. This translates into having storage rooms that are filled to the brink with hard copies of information. Here are some of the challenges that companies have to face in such a situation:
- As we just mentioned, there are a lot of logistical issues in terms of storing documents safely.
- Other than that, the accessibility of documents is very poor. Employees might have to spend significant amounts of time just finding relevant documents.
- Hard copies also don’t offer any sort of editability. This means that if a document has errors, the only way to rectify it is to make a new document from scratch because the previous one can’t be modified.
- Traditional documentation is very costly because of all the paper, ink, electricity, and bindings that are used in the process.
In contrast to this, the modern or digital documentation method has a number of benefits that are given in the next section.
Digital Documentation
The digital alternative of managing documents is much more convenient because of the reasons listed below:
- Digital documents are highly editable.
- The shareability of digitized information is very high. You can work on the same document while sitting miles apart.
- The modern protection mechanisms save digital documents from breaches and theft.
- Digital document management is much more sustainable for the environment and is cost-friendly.
Now that it is clear that digitized directories have a clear advantage over traditional methods let’s look into how we can speed up these digitization methods.
How to Speed Up Digital Transformation?
Digital transformation can be different for different companies. For example, a startup with no documents at the time can easily digitize its workflows as compared to a well-established firm with tons of paper documents. Therefore, we are going to show you a process that shows how you can digitize a certain documentation system.
Step 1: Understand Your Position
As we mentioned before as well, you need to understand where your company stands before starting the digitization process. This will help you choose software for the process. This decision of yours should, however, be based on a few things. A broad estimation of these things is given below:
- How many documents do you need to convert?
- How complex is the format of your existing documents?
- How important is it for you to convert all aspects of your documents? (text, format, graphs, tables)
If you know about these things beforehand, you will make a lot less mistakes during the digitalization. This will save you time and smoothen your digital transformation.
Step 2: Choose an Application
The next step is to choose the digitization application that you are going to use for this process. This decision also depends on certain factors. For example, if you have a massive database of documents, then using advanced and paid software might be a good idea.
However, the fastest and most efficient way of digitalization is using online tools to extract text from images for free. These are browser-based or downloadable software that allows you to input/upload an image containing text and convert that into machine-readable text.
For your ease, here is a generalized procedure for using such tools.
- Go to the tool’s website.
- Upload the image of your document.
- Click on the ‘Convert’ or ‘Start Conversion’ button.
- Clear the captcha verification (if prompted) and then wait for the conversion.
- A piece of text will be shown to you that you can copy or download as a Word file.
So, as you may have noticed, this process allows users to convert physical documents into digital ones, and the whole process comprises just a few seconds.
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Step 3: Proofread Errors Using AI
Lastly, in order to make your conversion errorless, you need to proofread whether the final product is acceptable or not. For this, you can utilize AI. Instead of manually reading every converted document, you can automate this process and save a significant amount of time.
AI can check spelling errors, grammar mistakes, and much more without taking a lot of time. So, if you want to speed up your digital transformation, the incorporation of AI is inevitable.
Final Words
To conclude this article, we would like to re-emphasize the fact that you need to pre-plan your steps while digitizing your documents. You might think of this as an extra step that makes your process even longer, but in reality, it saves you from a number of problems that you would otherwise face.
So, make a flow chart of the steps you are going to take and then implement them, as we have explained in detail above. We hope that this method will allow you to speed up your document computerization process.
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