Desktop document scanning is catching the attention of small and medium-sized businesses for a number of great reasons--improved operational efficiency and meeting compliance regulations are two that immediately come to mind. For a lot of people, document scanning and desktop scanners are a little mysterious. I've put together a little background on desktop scanners and eight tips to help you in deciding which scanner you need and, then, to get the most out of your new scanner and scanning experience to grow the operational effiency of your business.

Workgroup and departmental desktop scanners - differing in scanning speeds and throughput specifications, provide users with a dedicated capture unit for digitizing documents at an early stage of overall workflow. These scanners have provided desktop applications for a variety of industries, from legal to healthcare, enabling workers to meet compliance standards and better share and archive their information. In the last couple of years or so, a new sub category, personal workgroup scanners such as our new Kodak ScanMate i1120 Scanner, offer similar benefits, but integrate better affordability and portability for the small office and home office market. This sub-segment has also made it feasible for those who often do business on the road, such as insurance claim agents, to process information faster and more effectively. Overall, the workgroup and distributed scanners' small size coupled with intuitive embedded multifunctionalty enable virtually any knowledge based worker to easily implement document capture into their daily workflow.
Embedded multifunctional button applications are also now a mainstay of desktop scanners and networked scanners, combining the benefits of a dedicated scanner without the need for dedicated computer operation as the scanner takes advantage of programs and devices already on the network. Networked scanners, like our Scan Station 100 are finding favor with businesses whose individual employees may not need individual capture devices but do require a method for capturing, extracting and sharing critical information via an easy to use package. This segment will continue to provide increasing opportunities for SMBs to realize the total value of their existing information.

Great, now you know about the scanners. Which practices will enable you to get the best out of them? Here are eight helpful tips:

1. Identify an owner for the scanning application and gain management support—find out who in the organization has ownership of document capture standards. This source will know if the distributed capture devices will work with your content management system. If you don't have an in-house source, call a full service value added reseller who will listen to what you want to accomplish and design a solution with products to complement your businesses processes in fitting your needs today and tomorrow.
2. Eliminate "middleware" for image quality. Document scanners that embed image processing technologies—deskew, cropping, color correction, brightness and contrast controls—in the scanner driver will provide more efficient image enhancement than those that need to route image processing through middleware software packages.
3. Standardize the user experience—making it one button simple makes it easy to use, even intuitive, for everyone in the office. Making it so goes a long way to bringing repeatability to the scanning process and eliminating errors that anyone and everyone can make when using different pieces of equipment, each which works differently!
4. Centrally manage capture devices via a network to enable image capture at any scanner anywhere on the network. Consider network scanning in this pursuit. Having one centrally located device that everyone in the office can use democratizes document capture.
5. Collect index data at the device and validate it there. As documents are being injected into business application workflows, it is important to also collect the proper information about the document. This can be achieved by requiring the user to input a few simple fields at time of scanning, or using forms recognition software to automatically recognize documents and extract the required information from predetermined fields within the document. YES! This can be done with desktop scanning today.
6. Authenticate users on walkup network scanners. Security pays.
7. Provide programmatic integration. "Scanning and sending" is no longer the value of network or desktop capture brings to organizations. Business and ECM applications today are reaching out closer and closer to the scanner. Having the "back-end" application be fully integrated with the "front-end" capture application is the direction in which network and desktop scanning is going.
8. Log device usage to gain further efficiency of use.

Following these tips will help you get the most out of your new desktop scanner for capturing documents and getting information they contain quickly into your business processes. Watch your operational efficiency grow!