Preserving History for Future Learning
To continue their mission to provide advancing education, research, scholarships, and improve health care, this Association required help with converting their historical books into digital files. This Association values the history and resources it provides to its community and wanted to preserve them for future use. The opportunity to make historical resources easily accessible from anywhere created an opportunity to expand the resources they provide to their membership.
The Challenge
The Association’s historical files and books dated back to the early 1900s. They wanted to preserve the quality and condition of these items, limiting natural degradation that comes with normal use, while at the same time providing easy access. Some books were able to be cut and unbound while others needed to remain in their original format.
The Solution
The NOS Professional Services Solutions team was brought in early to understand the nature of the historical files and books and worked closely with the Association to understand which ones needed to remain bound. The unbound books were scanned using a high-volume scanner, and the bound books were scanned by a flatbed book scanner. As an additional quality control feature, each digital file was run through an OCR (Optical Character Recognition) and quality control process immediately after scanning was complete. Instituting an OCR process allows for a digital searchable format of multi-page PDFs. These files were uploaded to the associations network and a content management system was installed to provide easy access for their members from anywhere in the world. An additional benefit to digitally converting these historical files and books is they were able to minimize their filing cabinet and shelving space and offer additional space for administration and common areas. This new space was put to good use by the growing association. With an initial goal of preserving these historical books they were not only able to make them more accessible to their members but also find more space in their existing office to better serve their membership as a whole.
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Businesses pay high prices for marketing data. Mailing lists, for example, cost anywhere from $3 to more than $1000 per thousand. List provider Click2Mail starts their pricing for a consumer list at $33.66 CPM (cost per thousand). If you want a tightly targeted list, and you want to use it more than once, the price only goes up.
Yet many organizations have a ready-made source of marketing data in their client files – if they have imaged their documents.
A couple of examples:
1. Marketing data for external sales: A large law firm provided services in multiple specialties, including intellectual property (IP), family law, and estate law. The firm’s IP clients were becoming wealthy thanks to the efforts of their attorneys. Other clients had successfully adopted children through the work of their family law attorneys. Both groups of clients needed estate services to organize their wills and trusts for the benefit of their dependents.
But the estate lawyers didn’t know these clients needed their services. Busy attorneys don’t have time to extract marketing intel from client files.
Then the law firm imaged their client files, creating a searchable, sortable database. The firm’s marketing manager can now query the client database for existing clients that fit the profile for estate services. The firm can serve their clients better and generate additional revenues – a win for everyone.
2. Marketing data for internal sales: A major corporation established a business travel and commuting office for its employees. This office was tasked with assisting employees in making reservations, finding the best travel value for the dollar, and distributing reimbursement for certain commuting modes. Management’s expectation was that the travel office should deliver a quick ROI in order to justify its existence.
Prior to digitization the accounting department’s travel reimbursement forms, the travel office had to examine the individual paper forms to determine employees’ travel and commuting habits – an error-prone and time-consuming process. Now the travel office pulls internal marketing lists from the imaged reimbursement forms, with electronic speed. They can target specific groups of employees to alert them to travel savings that dovetail with customer locations, and they can keep commuters up to date on opportunities like new bus routes and carpools.
“Everyone sells” is the business principle that every employee encounters chances to sell their company’s products or services. It’s a low-cost way of bringing in more business. Your client data can sell too, if it’s not locked up on paper. A database of imaged documents will provide actionable marketing intel, without the high price of outsourced marketing data.
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Businesses everywhere are looking for ways to operate more sustainably. It’s not just good for the planet, it’s good for business. More and more these days, customers consider sustainability when making a purchasing decision.
But sustainability is more than a good marketing decision; it’s a money-saver too, especially in the manufacturing and supply-chain sectors. Less waste and lower energy use mean lower production costs. And RFID-informed processes excel at reducing waste and energy use.
The right amount in the right place at the right time– throughout the manufacturing and distribution chain, RFID tracks components and finished products, reducing waste in every sector of the supply chain.
- Manufacturers aren’t blind-sided by sudden shortages of essential parts.
- Retailers aren’t burdened with excess inventory, as they know what’s in the supply pipeline.
- Warehouse operations aren’t caught between manufacturers demanding more storage space and retailers accepting less product.
- Transportation providers don’t waste fuel and carbon credits on partial loads. The entire supply chain, start to finish, is streamlined to respond to demand.
Real-time information, 100% accurate – RFID tracking data is sent and received in real time, with completely accurate reports. Supply chain sectors are able to respond without delay, and the supply predictability supports energy conservation.
- Information lets manufacturers adjust their operations’ energy usage to match demand.
- Retailers update manufacturers immediately as inventory is sold, making demand predictable.
- Warehouse operations monitor inventory movement to predict future storage needs.
- Transportation providers anticipate inventory shipments, taking advantage of fuel values based on future needs in the short term.
An extra bonus: faster invoicing. With RFID tracking all product components and finished products throughout the supply chain, each sector is assured that delivery is complete. Invoice data is pulled from the RFID report and sellers can invoice immediately and accurately.
Even the RFID tags themselves are moving in the direction of sustainability. The earliest RFID tags contained plastic – not a choice favored by sustainability experts. Recently, however, some tag manufacturers have developed paper tags that are recyclable and compostable. Moreover, the tag manufacturing process itself benefits from RFID tracking, just like other manufacturing processes.
With RFID, everyone benefits – supply chain organizations, consumers, and Planet Earth.
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Regulatory compliance is a primary driver for many organizations to add document conversion (digitization) to their standard operating procedures. Managing the massive quantities of compliance-related data in just one bank or one hospital is a time-consuming and error-prone task if it’s done by hand. A compliance audit can be tortuous if data is hard to find or incorrect.
But let’s say you’ve made the decision to go digital, digitization your documents into a secure, searchable database. The story doesn’t end there. Even when documents have been imaged, the resulting database itself must be designed to collect and deliver information in a useful form.
If you think of the database like a library’s card catalog (remember those?), you can get a clearer picture of how to structure the database to fit your organization’s compliance needs. Just like the many large drawers in a card catalog, the data “catalog” should be:
- Centralized– what are all the various data sources? Build one central repository that links to all the sources of data throughout the enterprise.
- Classified/categorized– what are all the types of data? Identify each imaged document, and the data it contains, by category. Remember, more metadata (classification information) means faster, more accurate search results.
- Cross-referenced– what information is needed by which regulatory body (often more than one)? Data should be identifiable by all the regulations to which it applies. Data from some healthcare compliance documents might also apply to tax rules, for example.
One thing the old card catalog didn’t do well, if at all, was tracking. Data provenance can be very important in a compliance audit, and metadata tracking provides a digitized document’s history: Who, when, and where was it created? Who modified it? Who accessed it? Where did it move within the organization? Privacy regulations in particular require a complete provenance record. A well-designed database can easily deliver this information in the event of an audit.
Beyond the regulatory requirements, a database of imaged documents can produce actionable information. Facilities managers can query the warranty information of equipment, or the country of origin of furnishings. Team managers can identify documents needed for a particular project, and make them accessible to team members. These types of activities become far more efficient and more productive when a properly designed database is delivering the information quickly and accurately.
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