management, Document scanning Costs

Hi,

Can anyone advise to who much the scanning of company documents costs,
per sheet? We are looking into having our records scanned and stored
onto servers by a scanning company. If anyone can advise to who much
we will be looking at for:

1) Cost per page [scanning]
2) Cost per MB for storage
3) any other costs

Hope someone can advise.

Regards,
Anthony

It is a difficult question because there are quiet a few variables,
including where in the world you are, are you including wage costs in
your calculations and what sort of quality control you need. You need
to think of ongoing storage costs and depending on the format you are
storing them in, you may need to upgrade the format they are stored in
every x years to guarentee retrieval.

I have seen companies go for the cheapest option and then find our
years latter when they come to look at the document when they need it,
that it is too light, skewed, thick lines over the image where the
scanner was not serviced. The 'best' I ever saw was 3000 blank pages
where the scanner camera broke and no one realised.

Anthony

Costs for back scanning documents will vary due to a number of
variables and like the previous respondent stated be carefull who you
contract to do it - the cheapest will always cause you more aggravation
in the long run.

Variables to consider

document volumes - the more pages you have the lower the per page scan
rate

Document/paper types - flimsey, old, damaged, odd sized paper takes
longer to prepare for scanning and therefore costs more

Paper archive preparation state - if your documents are single A4 pages
with no staples etc then preparation time is less so costs less - if as
the norm there are post it notes and multiple staples, binders etc then
they take longer to prep for scanning and therefore costs more

How much seperation is required - ie by batch seperator, document
seperator or page seperator

What indexing do you require - ie by batch, document or page -
obviously the more indexing required the higher the cost

How long you need the documents archived - certain regulated industries
have specific storage and destruction requirements

What do you want to do with the paper after scanning - ie secure
destruction with certificate, deep storage off site

As you can see scanning can be a minefield for the unwarry company and
the preparation and indexing costs will normally be areas where you are
caught out - If you want any more info - just drop me an email for a
bit of free advice.

regards

Neil Gittins
NG Consulting Services
XXXX@XXXXX.COM

Hello Anthony

I am the Marketing Manager of a document scanning company Our main
business is archive scanning but we also have a brand new service
where you can have weekly scanning done and uploaded online.

We charge by the sheet for the archive work and by the envelope for the
electronic filing.

As the other gentlemen have previously said there are variables that
can efect price however we do not charge for extra for online storage.

If you would like anymore details please email me @

XXXX@XXXXX.COM

Happy Scanning :)

Sharon

There's some very good free information at www.aiim.org - for example, take
a look at http://www.aiim.org/article-aiim.asp?ID=31103. Once you determine
WHAT you want to have scanned and HOW you want the documents classified and
indexed, my experience has been that bids from different backfile conversion
vendors will all come in pretty close - if you want to do it yourself,
depending on the number of documents, it can be a significant work effort.

Obviously, you'll want some type of search, retrieval, and display mechanism
to manage the scanned documents.

Anthony,

As you probably have gathered from the information presented thus far,
costs and timeframes are effected by a myriad of varying factors
including but not limited to; volume of pages to be converted, format
of the image files outputted, resolution of image in DPI, quality of
original physical document, categorization / indexing information
extracted and how your company will access the digital images.

As a resource that may prove helpful, please visit a link on our
website that will provide you information about methodology you should
consider before embarking on the road to Digital Document Management.
The URL is: http://www.dcpartners-inc.com/dcpi-methodology.htm

Best of success with your project,

Matthew Dedes
Digital Convergence Partners, Inc.
XXXX@XXXXX.COM

Hi Anthony,

As everyone has said, "the cost varies", you might do well to perform
your usual due diligence that you would while buying a car or a phone
or a holiday... what are you looking for in terms of features, and what
are the various service providers offering, features and price. :-)

In North America, the cost varies from 1 cent per sheet to 99 cents per
sheet, depending on volume, paper quality, image size, whether you want
OCR on it, the type of indexing (auto/manual/reliable), whether you
want hosting, etc. In many cases, google-style auto-indexing might be
good enough, in this case, a search engine spiders your document store
(either searchable PDF, XML, or some other text+graphics format).

While a scanning service bureau wouldn't say this, if your volumes are
low enough or high enough, you might actually be able to do all of what
you need internally. Also, a lot of companies see a better performance
if their document storage server was actually in-house. Document
scanning service is a highly competitive business, and margins are
getting thinner by the day, ensure that your provider is not cutting
costs by cutting corners.

Our company assists in helping scanning service bureaus and companies
doing high volume scanning automate the process and get the best out of
their infrastructure with solutions and cutting-edge technologies. We
don't directly offer those services, but if you could give us more
details about volumes, turnaround, geographical location,
pickup/retention/destruction schedules, we might have scanning service
bureau customers who could help you.

Regards,
Milind Joshi
IDEA TECHNOSOFT INC.
http://www.ideatechnosoft.com

How much is a book-printer and scanner?

Might as well, buy new books in electronic form from publishers and
print them.

But old books, you can just cut the binding off, and unstitch it, and
scan the pages at high speed and it can destroy the binding and in some
cases even the paper, in other cases rebinding the book, in archive
media. Perhaps, even, softbacks would be easier to scan (done by
pouring them into the mechanical tumbler). So, I want a machine where
I pour softback books in the tumbler and it delivers softback and
hardback books into the scanner, as necessarily closing the book,
removing the binding, and then leafing through the stacked,
non-creased, visually inspected, box of neat paperback books.

Then, they would be scanned into electronic form where sophisticated
software like Optical Character Recognition could help put the library
numbers on the book, the ISBN and so forth.

The point is getting the rights, so you might as well scan them to help
you figure out how to go about that, like CDs.

So, you figure the used paperback book stores have already collected
the paperback and other books to scan into readable form, for blind
people. Blind people could come to the brail reader in the store and
read to them with headphones for the visually impaired.

How much, could you pay, for a book scanner where you pour the books
into the hopper?

Heh, book making, bookmaking.

How 'bout a Quotron?

Or, you could pass out free book page scanners, and have people scan
books and drop them in the mail. Looks like a magnifying glass, just
pass it over the pages and it has a red light and a green light. A
person sitting there could scan a book in like fifteen minutes.

I could eat a book, in like fifteen minutes.

Of course, it helps if you take like an hour and carefully scan the
book. You could get a free printout of your refurbished scanned book,
bound and stitched in leather, carboard, or backing bindings,
loose-leaf and glued.

Ross

I do not get the point or reasoning for this message!

Anthony

Oh, I do, thank you.

I have written PDF and TIFF and JPEG software, and other document
imaging type applications.

For example, AIIM scanners allow access to your high speed scanners
like you pixtran and so on and so forth with the ISIS, etc.

See my web site, I have TIFF software for sale:

http://www.apexintsoft.com/

Leather, for book bindings, I believe sells by the square foot or yard.
Pleather, on the other hand, sells by the ton.


Ross F.

Anthony,

The following link is a useful document imaging calculator.

<a
href=" http://www.softfile.com/calrim/content/pages/calculator.html "> http://www.softfile.com/calrim/content/pages/calculator.html< ;/a>

Matt Monaghan
SoftFile

Working Link:

http://www.softfile.com/calrim/content/pages/calculator.html

Anthony:

We typically do not charge for our services on a per page (or hourly
basis for that matter). With this approach, it can be very difficult to
determine the true total cost of your project. I guess it is a little
like requesting quotes to get your house painted, and your price is
based on the estimated number of brush strokes.

As such, we offer our prospective clients a number of project planning
tools to help ensure that their project is properly scoped. In
addition, we also have a Vendor Evaluation Matrix that will allow you
to quickly and easily compare the service offerings, quality
commitments, project approaches and total costs from multiple vendors
to determine the best value, not necessarily the lowest cost per page.
Please contact me directly if you would like to learn more...


Jim
James M. Eglin, Jr.
EVP, Global Sales and Marketing
Digital Documents, LLC
XXXX@XXXXX.COM
http://www.DigitalDocumentsLLC.com

hi anthony , i wanna know how big ur company is because if u need to
scan ur documents why dont dont u go to buy our product .
its document management system . which can scan store and do lots of
things in the management of docs. look at www.finedocs.com


regards
Ash

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