Does this mean that you should not employ digital imaging in your company? Not at all. It just means that it requires a more sophisticated approach to the role that computers will play in your total business operations.

We do have the ability to present effective document management solutions that will rapidly scan, capture, index, store, retrieve and distribute information electronically inside and outside your company.

Major advancements in hard drive and optical disk storage technologies allow us to store massive amounts of information that can be immediately accessed by anyone on your computer network who has authorization to the data.

The digital imaging of paperwork has revolutionized the way many companies do business today. Any application that involves a tremendous amount of paper and requires access from many users, could be an excellent candidate for this technology. The application should drive the technology. How fast do you have to find it and how many people will be looking for it? Those are the key questions to ask when looking at electronic imaging systems.

The explosions of PC's in the office environment have driven down the cost of imaging so that it is truly affordable to almost any company. You can easily enter the electronic imaging world for less than $15,000, but can also spend over $100,000, so you have to do your homework and deal with a reputable vendor who understands the business.

Imaging software can start as low as $2,000 for a single workstation license. A 10-user network license for your PC LAN will be approximately $10,000. Large mainframe software is also available, but most offerings in this category will easily slide over the $100,000 price tag.

Scanners that will allow us to digitize your paper start as low as $500, but a typical unit that is fairly fast and offers automatic document feeding will be in the $4,000 price range.

Storage can be on a hard drive, but most likely would be moved to an optical disk, an erasable optical disk or CD-ROM media. In many applications we install a CD-ROM or optical disk jukebox to allow access to several disks without any manual intervention required.

CD-ROM is everybody's favorite today because it is the only one with full industry standards protection and the CD's can be used in any CD-ROM drive. The current 650MB CD-ROM can hold approximately 13,000 8.5" X 11" documents or 3,000 engineering drawings.

A typical 5.25" WORM (write-once-read-many) optical disk can hold up to 40,000 office documents, but these are usually proprietary devices that are not compatible with other systems.

Erasable optical disks work much like a floppy disk, but hold far greater amounts of information. The new format for this media is a 2.6GB disk that can store over 100,000 sheets of paper. That's about 10 file cabinets on one 5.25" magneto-optical disk!

Printing from electronic imaging systems is a breeze. Most software packages provide standard Windows™ drivers so that you can print to any laser printer or network printer on your system.

Electronic imaging systems for manufacturing companies dealing with engineering drawings are a little more complicated, but still quite affordable and manageable versus current paper storage systems used in most companies.

Manufacturing companies will usually elect to microfilm their engineering drawings so that they can have the aperture card for legal and archival purposes. Aperture cards are then scanned to create raster images of each drawing. You can scan drawings with a large-format paper scanner but it is slower and more expensive than microfilm, and still does not provide you proper backup for this valuable document that runs your company.

Entry level imaging for engineering drawings may simply be a raster viewing package that allows you to see the drawings on a computer screen instead of looking at a copy or the original drawing.

The next step up would be a viewing and editing package that would allow you to make "electronic" changes to the drawing, much like you would in a CAD system.

Full capability engineering documentation management systems provide vaulting capability, engineering change process control, release and revision control and interfaces to other business applications such as CAD, purchasing, accounting and personnel. This type of systems is known as EDM (engineering data management), PDM (product data management), or TDM (total data management).

CD-ROM

We did mention CD-ROM above as a component of a total document management system, but should also review it as a simple storage and retrieval option when looking for alternatives to your paper-based operations.

Scanned paper documents can be stored in a TIFF format on the CD-ROM. There are several viewing and management programs that can be embedded on the same CD-ROM to allow viewing and printing of images.

The ability to run everything from the CD-ROM eliminates the requirement to have the document management software resident on your computer system.

This is very popular when you want the information to be portable and easily moved with you, or sent to users of the information. Continued