‘Speed-dial’ Scanning for Laserfiche

Chore Time Brock is a leading global designer, manufacturer and marketer of agricultural systems and solutions located in Milford, Indiana. For the past nine years their human resources department has relied on a Laserfiche document management system to archive, search, and access thousands of past and present employee records from their various sites and divisions. Until recently all paper documents flowed through the corporation to one scan station and workgroup scanner for capture into the Laserfiche system. But economic belt tightening has reduced personnel to staff the centralized scanning position. As a result the HR department had fallen behind in scanning, thereby creating a large backfile of paper records.

Kathy McDowell and Paula Hanes of the HR department contacted their Laserfiche reseller and explained their problem. Though the Laserfiche system worked well for storage and retrieval of HR records, they would require help to get the backlog of paper documents into the system. They knew the reseller could provide scanning and indexing services to get them caught up, but before CTB management would authorize the scanning they issued a challenge. Kathy and Paula would have to show them a solution to scanning documents internally that would prevent them from falling behind again, and adding personnel was not an option.

Kathy and Paula realized that while the daily volume of records to be scanned was not large, waiting for the paper documents to traverse the departmental paper shuffle was inefficient and time consuming. They simply did not have adequate staff to assign a specific person to the scanning duties. It was reasoned that if the daily scanning could distributed among their staff that the load would be manageable and records would be available in the system sooner. At the same time they realized that to be practical the scanning procedures would need to be simplified so that department staff could be trained to scan and index documents quickly and with a minimum risk of errors.

Kathy and Paula met with their Laserfiche reseller to examine the problem and discuss solutions. The reseller recommended that CTB convert to distributed capture using personal scanners with a connector software (BOLT Bridge) to seamlessly connect and scan to Laserfiche. The BOLT Bridge software was developed to enable advanced features built into personal scanners as well as to simplify the process of capturing frequently scanned documents. BOLT Bridge would allow CTB to pre-define document profiles with information regarding document naming, routing, and indexing, and then select desired profiles at scan time using as little as one press of a button on the scanner or one click of a mouse. Fast, error proof, and cost effective, the BOLT Bridge solution was exactly what Kathy and Paula were looking for.

CTB selected Kodak ScanMate i1120 personal desktop document scanners to use with the BOLT Bridge software on their Laserfiche enabled computers. BOLT Bridge utilizes advanced scanner features (in this case the Kodak SmartTouch feature) to provide one button scanning directly to Laserfiche. Working with Kathy and Paula to define the document profiles the Laserfiche reseller installed and configured the scanners and software.

CTB HR department can now capture information to the Laserfiche system faster and more efficiently thereby making the system more useful than before. The BOLT Bridge document profiles have made scanning extremely simple and easy to train to all department personnel. When asked how her department likes the new scanning process Paula answers, "the BOLT Bridge is great! It has made scanning much simpler, enough so that I can easily show anyone how to do it in just a couple of minutes. We refer to it as our Speed Dial for Laserfiche". Kathy sums it up simply "we love our new ‘Speed dial’ scanning for Laserfiche!"

For more information about BOLT Bridge for Laserfiche visit: www.boltbridge.com

For more information about Kodak document scanners visit: http://graphics.kodak.com/docimaging/US/en/Products/Document_Scanners/Desktop/index.htm.