Whatever happened to the paperless office?

Every year, the paper seems to mount. Invoices, purchase orders, contracts, technical specifications, design documents, bank statements, checks, correspondence, board minutes - all accumulate in file drawers, banker boxes, file rooms and off site storage facilities.

These mountains of material are too important to throw out. You must, by law, meet certain retention requirements. You don't want to destroy anything you may need in the future - who wants to take a risk that the one box that gets destroyed contains a key document that could be the difference between winning and loosing a major lawsuit?

Yet, these paper mountains are increasingly expensive to store, search and maintain. Each cubic foot of paper is a space that you can't use for personnel, equipment or other income producing resources. Each time your people search for a document, you may loose significant amounts of productive time in a futile effort to locate a misfiled or non-existent document. Each time you remove a document from the paper archives, you run the risk that it will not be correctly re-filed and can't be located again.

EIS designs and implements easy-to-use document management solutions

Our solutions digitally store large volumes of archived documents at a fraction of the cost of archiving paper records. They require a very small fraction of the space, are easier to search and once a document is included in the electronic archive, it can never be removed. You can easily and inexpensively copy the entire digital archive and keep a backup in a secure area. You can provide access to the digital archive via the Internet or corporate network. And, you can archive electronic files (e.g. word processing documents, emails, etc.) as well as paper.

EIS can develop a document management solution that meets your storage and retrieval needs and stays within your budget. We can assemble the hardware, software and training services you need to get your digital archives system up and running. We can scan and archive your backfile to bring your archives up to the current day. And, we can provide the on-going assistance to your archives team to make sure they are well supported and productive.

Depending on your particular business requirements and available budget, there are many well-established archives systems available - from the inexpensive "bare bones" to the sophisticated "top of the line". We can help you determine your needs and help you choose the system that is right for you.

Digital Archive Volumes

You may wish to consider a simple, straightforward archive approach we have used - Digital Archive Volumes ("DAVs"). DAVs are CD-ROM based collections of digitized records. Each DAV is self-contained; the software required to search, view and print the records is included on each disk. Records can be searched by title and / or by full text.

Let EIS help you archive the mountains of paper in a system that supports your storage and retrieval needs and saves your people time and money.

Re-purposing archived materials

Documents that are archived can be reissued for another purpose (i.e. "re-purposed"). Re-purposed documents can be reissued on the same media or a different one. For example, a purchase order document that was archived on CD could subsequently be emailed to the customer as part of a request for payment. In this way, archived documents could be distributed to all company employees via the Internet, a corporate network, or even in print.