ICM Document Solutions was up to the challenge, and put in place a day-forward scanning solution that let our client scan work-orders into a running maintenance log for each aircraft as they arrived on-site for maintenance. Our solution was turn-key, including the hardware, software, training and support required to get them up & running with a highly-repeatable process their quality department loved.

By implementing ICM ViewCenter with security permissions to allow each business unit to control it’s own documents, our client is now able to provide both internal and external customers with granular access to required data through web-based access from any location. Before this repository was available, it was a labor intensive process to replicate and distribute the required documentation. A unique login and password for the ViewCenter is given to customers and specific projects and work orders are assigned to that user.

The client came to us with several objectives:

• Provide disaster recovery by digitizing a warehouse full of paper that could ground millions of dollars in planes in the event of a natural disaster.
• Provide a repeatable process that quality would embrace.
• Streamline the process to avoid duplication of data. This means avoiding data living and updated in more than one content management system.
• Integrate with an onsite ERP system that is not sitting on the latest and greatest of platforms.
• Enable a day forward team scanning environment that will mimic and utilize the tools and efficiencies much like our scanning service bureau.
• Enable secure online access to documents for their customers.
• Provide a system that can scale to other departments as needed to take advantage of the technology in place.

ICM accomplished these objectives by creating a secure online repository - ViewCenter with appropriate security and permissions in place to allow each business unit within the organization to establish, control and distribute their electronic documents according to policy.

A formal retention policy is also applied to assist in the formal management of the destruction of the documents when their lifecycle ends. A specific search and view of the start and end dates for each project is enabled for the retention administrator to facilitate:

• The approval of destruction
• Legal hold placement of documents
• Being proactive in the management of the series assigned to each project and work order

The final objective was to get the process approved by the local FAA office representative. This process was inclusive to the scan and electronic storage & distribution of documents securely, and the management of the retention policy through the system.

It’s not using the paper that creates the issues. It’s storing the documents, retrieving the information it contains, and applying a consistent and repeatable process with updated content. Information is often in too many silos, leading to confusion and duplication of data.

The ramifications of “lost” or “misfiled” documents within the process can create additional complications to the organization in all areas, particularly with civil aviation regulators like the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA). In addressing all of the challenges of paper and the interaction of so many related processes, ICM’s best in breed document management solution combines capture technology with a secure, process-based information management tool that can include workflow automation, increasing the visibility of in-process documentation while ensuring access to information across the business and beyond.

By moving these business-critical documents out of the in-baskets and onto your PC, allows for documents to be processed electronically and shared with internal departments, external partners, and regulators. These tools enable your organization to gain control of their paper, reducing the amount of paper that is manually routed around the business, and convert documents into electronic forms that can be quickly and easily accessed for immediate resolution to operational bottlenecks.

Even if your company hasn’t embraced ISO yet, the principles that it embodies can help you perform better - and an important part of QMS best-practices and the ISO standards is how you manage your documents. ISO 9001 requires storage & versioning for policies, procedures, work instructions and other documents to ensure that business stays on-track. ICM ViewCenter facilitates ISO 9001 best-practices for Document Control (4.2.3) and Records Keeping (4.2.4) compliance and supports QMS best-practices and does it affordably.

If you're already ISO-certified, or seeking future certification, then ICM ViewCenter can be valuable in helping you meet the standards required for certification, "An organization applying for ISO 9001 certification is audited based on an extensive sample of its sites, functions, products, services and processes. If there are no major nonconformities, the certification body will issue a certificate. Where major nonconformities are identified, the organization will present an improvement plan to the certification body, and once the certification body is satisfied that the organisation has carried out sufficient corrective action, it will issue a certificate."

ViewCenter was designed to store and organize the documents and records required to meet ISO certification standards, and also assists with maintaining accurate, correct versioning of those documents to pass future ISO compliance audits:

• Revision Control not only ensures that right procedures & policies are being used, but also provides access to older revisions to compare changes in your process over time.
   
• Records Retention ensures regulatory compliance by creating rule-based retention and disposition schedules for your documents.
   
• Digital Rights Management protects sensitive documents by managing access based on configurable user, group, department, and role-based access settings.
   
• Document Annotation ensures that author, reviewer, and stakeholder comments are stored with each document to provide details about the review & approval process behind it.
   
• Workflow Management integration allows you to streamline your review and approval processes with rule-based automatic task assignment across your organization.
   
• Document Imaging allows you to create a day forward scanning solution on the departmental or organizational level to scan new documents as they are generated, which eliminates the need for expensive, long-term paper storage.
   
• Remote Access allows your team to view securely view stored documents from any location, which is especially important for reviewing stored procedures and procedures on the factory floor. It also lets you distribute documents quickly across your entire organization, helping to eliminate delays in implementing new processes.
   

ICM Document Solutions has 24-years of experience in film & document scanning, and we've put that expertise into ICM ViewCenter. It provides secure, reliable operation and seamless legacy integration that makes it the perfect fit for any size budget.

The most obvious benefit to Day Forward scanning is that it eliminates the creation of a backfile. By scanning documents as you receive them, you eliminate the need to put those documents in long-term storage. Basically, what we’re talking about in this context is “nipping the problem in the bud”, which is highly aligned with lean manufacturing techniques by eliminating transportation, storage, and labor costs associated with moving them to another location, and then sorting, retrieving, and eventually purging them from your archives.

In this context, Day Forward scanning for documents creates a savings for your company over the entire lifecycle of the document. If they’re not physically archived, then an entire cost-chain is eliminated that keeps future costs low & prevents headaches. There’s another benefit to Day Forward scanning that’s even more compelling, though – and that’s the accessibility of the document in current operations.

By digitizing documents as they’re generated, manufacturers are able to integrate those documents into the production lifecycle so that a complete record for any particular part can follow it through the entire manufacturing process. If defects are found in sub-components or workers on the manufacturing floor need to easily reference details about the part, they can do so on the fly rather than requesting the documents from a repository.

One of ICM’s clients – a major aerospace manufacturer located in Arizona – does exactly this, by digitizing invoices containing the serial numbers for sub-components used in their manufacturing process. When a shipment of sub-components arrives from their vendors, they digitally scan the manifests into the ICM ViewCenter document management system as the components are inventoried, and then the manifest is digitally attached to parts that contain those subcomponents.

In this client’s particular case, FAA regulations specify that they be able to identify sub-components in any of their products by serial number just in case defects are found that require product recall or further investigation. Additionally, they have vendor requirements to provide a list of subcomponents used in each of the products they deliver. These combined requirements led to past work-stoppages related to government and customer questions about the sub-components, and led our client to install ICM ViewCenter and a Day Forward scanning system as a solution.

This brings up a fundamental difference between Day Forward and backfile scanning, which is how they’re implemented. In most cases, Day Forward scanning is performed on-site, by client employees, and typically integrated into their business processes. This allows it to become a part of normal operations, rather than a special project, which is another cost-saving benefit.

If In terms of implementation, ICM is able to deliver custom-fit integration for Day Forward scanning solutions that include hardware, software, and business process refinement that provides seamless integration with your existing processes at a low cost. This makes its benefits accessible to a wide range of companies who stand to save of thousands to millions of dollars over the course of each fiscal year by implementing a Day Forward scanning program.

Simply put, the backfile is all of the stored paper documents that basically contain the history of your company. That may sound like a grandiose description, but when you stop to think about it that’s really what it is. While the people, products, and even buildings in your company come and go over time, the paper is what provides continuity in your business. It is quite literally the history of what your company has done, and the older or larger your company is, the more of it you’re storing.

How you store your backfile depends a lot on the type of business that you’re in. A doctor’s office stores active patient records for in a circular file for easy access, whereas an aerospace company may store them in a secure off-site warehouse to meet federal retention requirements. These are both large repositories for paper documents, but structured differently to meet the security, accessibility, cost requirements for a particular industry.

Your backfile is a slow, quiet drain on profitability that eats dollar bills every time you search for a document. The recurring cost comes from the labor involved with finding documents, but in cases where a document can’t be found it costs an average of $220 to recreate it. In addition to the labor it costs to retrieve a document from your backfile, there are additional costs to transport those papers & move them when the backfile gets too crowded.

A hospital, for instance, can’t maintain a revolving file for everyone that visits, so it retrieves those records from the backfile and moves to another file for the duration of the patient’s visit. The same issue occurs in a lawyer’s office, where files are retrieved, added to, and later re-stored – all of which involves labor.

Manufacturers have different issues: while the documents they create aren’t as “high touch” as doctors or lawyers, they produce a lot of documents, and if there are government regulations or internal initiatives (like ISO 9000/9001) that require secure storage, then they end up spending a considerable amount of money to maintain their own storage facility or rent space from a commercial storage provider.

One of ICM’s clients – a well-known aerospace manufacturer – was faced with government regulations that led them to store their backfile with an off-site vendor. At first, it seemed like a good solution, but it wasn’t long before they realized the cost was a lot higher than they’d counted on. Not only were they committed to shipping costs that escalated as their business grew, but as their business got larger they also found themselves retrieving 10 to 20 documents a week from storage – at a cost of $20 per document, in addition to shipping.

The solution to storing a large backfile is to digitally scan those documents into a document management system like ICM ViewCenter. Instead of paying storage &retrieval costs, your entire company history becomes re-integrated into a modern digital library, and finding documents is as easy as using a search-engine like Google.

Scanning your backfile into a document management system not only increases the accessibility of important documents, but it improves security. ICM ViewCenter offers granular permissions settings on documents that allow fine-grain control over which documents are accessible to a specific user, group, or department. The goal is to ensure that employees in your shipping department don’t have access to executive-level data unless they’re specifically authorized to view it, and ViewCenter easily provides a level of control that’s generally not available in a physical storage environment.

In addition to secure permissions, digital archiving also lets you automatically set retention-control for your documents, which is a giant cost-saving measure. If your documents only need to be stored for 5 years past their active date, it’s easy to create rules for individual documents or entire groups of records that purge them from storage when they’re no longer needed. This eliminates the cost of sorting & maintaining your document library – something that haunts established companies paying storage on paper they no longer need to retain.

Scanning the backfile can provide tremendous savings to your company, not only in terms of long-term storage on a constantly increasing body of paper, but also from labor savings in retrieving documents. It also provides a level of security & fine-grain permissions not available with paper documents, and allows you to finally re-integrate the history of your company into your day to day operations.

Statistics by the Gartner Group show how the hidden costs of paper cut into your profitability over time. The labor involved with searching for documents adds up rapidly, and since 7.5% of all documents go missing at some point, you’re in for a much larger bill when need something that’s not filed where it should be. Digging through your archives for misfiled documents costs money, and if you still come up empty handed it costs an average of $220 to replace it.

Not surprisingly, corporate America has turned to digital technologies as an alternative to printed documents – and for the most part it solves the problem. Instead of storing printed material, simply keep a copy of the Word, Excel, or PowerPoint file and eliminate the clutter and cost of a physical archive. In the late 90’s, the buzzword was “going paperless”, and we all pushed towards a paperless office to cut costs, reduce lost time, and save a tree where we could.

A decade later, most of our daily office work is completely digital – and documents that we print out for meetings are recycled rather than stored since we’ve got digital copies of the original. Going digital worked well us as a “day forward” solution in cases where we knew that the reader would be on a PC and we could write for a digital environment.

Going paperless works, but not for everything – and a decade after we’ve all “gone digital” it’s led to a schism in most companies where we maintain two filing systems: one for digital documents, and another for the paper. As it turns out, back in the 90’s we’d overlooked some fundamental aspects of how companies use paper that prevented us going completely digital - and it’s led to fundamental pain as a result.

Invoices, receipts, manifests & bills of lading, and other “official documents” have been some of the worst offenders in terms of clutter, for a couple of reasons. First , because there are so many of them – they’re a part of daily operations in most firms, so they pile up rapidly. These documents need to be stored for various reasons: for accounting records, tax purposes, insurance requirements, and government regulations. Sometimes they’re stored just in case they’re needed later, which is often the case for document such as parts-lists, invoices, and shipping manifests.

We all store paper for another reason as well: anything signed, stamped, or sealed is “official”, and the mark or signature on it means there’s a hardcopy involved. This includes a wide array of documents ranging from college degrees to loan and title paperwork.

So where does all this paper end up? You already know the answer – first in filing cabinets, and later I boxes in a warehouse. Maybe its stored on-site, which adds a labor cost when someone goes hunting for records, and oftentimes it’s stored off-site, which involves expensive processing & shipping fees to retrieve and later re-file the paperwork when you need it.

Add it all up, and the annual cost of filing, sorting, searching, and reproducing paper is millions of dollars for even mid-sized companies – and it’s a hidden drain on profitability that adds a few dollars to the bill every time you even touch a sheet of paper. Not only is it hidden, but most companies don’t even take it into account since paper has been the imcumbent storage medium in our society for hundreds of years. It’s simply assumed that the costs will occur, and they’re not broken out which makes them even more difficult to qualify.

The hidden costs of paper are not unavoidable: the obvious solution is to scan those paper documents into easily-accessible digital files, which has been a growing practice across the country for over a decade. Even if government or industry regulations require you to store a paper hardcopy, having a digital copy of the document for use as a reference eliminates much of the hidden costs associated with it.

Scanning by itself isn’t a complete solution, however, because of the volume of documents involved. The best practice is to scan papers into a document management system, which allows employees to locate files using a keyword search just like you’d use Google to find a website. Even better, when those documents have met their retention requirements – when they’re simply no longer valid – finding and deleting them can be done automatically.

When you take the entire lifecycle of a paper document into consideration, the hidden costs of paper add up to a substantial drain on profitability – and now that we’ve outlined some of the places that it occurs, you’ll undoubtedly start to see examples of it throughout your business. There is a solution, however, and by combining document scanning with a robust document management system you can overcome the hidden costs of paper and increase profitability in your company.

]]> http://www.icmdocs.com/news/the-hidden-costs-of-paper.html/feed 0 http://www.icmdocs.com/news/a-winning-performance-is-a-measured-performance.html?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=a-winning-performance-is-a-measured-performance http://www.icmdocs.com/news/a-winning-performance-is-a-measured-performance.html#comments Wed, 20 Jun 2012 17:31:06 +0000 admin http://www.icmdocs.com/?p=1092 With the document scanning industry more competitive than ever, it is essential for ICM to continue to differentiate itself from other market forces through superior customer service and a competitive pricing model. One of the primary components to making this happen is identifying key performance goals, and finding a way to track progress in a timely manner, and attack the issues as needed.

While our scan operation has always been a metrics driven organization, our current reporting processes have gained traction over several months, and initiated continual improvements in many critical areas.

Some key reports include:

1. Task Productivity – This is generally measured in % relative to goal, with the aim being 100%. Working at 100% productivity means the process is predictable and project expectations are being met. This data is captured in our P5 system - and is reported daily, weekly, and monthly by team, operator, task - you name it.

3. Correction/Rework Analysis – This report is generated daily. Summarized in a weekly report, it provides data on the dreaded corrections and rework needed to address quality issues. As we promote items through the task queues, each operator has an opportunity to document/fix a quality issue, and provide feedback on needed action. The report tracks # of errors, % of boxes with errors, time spent on corrections and rework, and overall % of correction time relative to all production time allocated to projects.

Currently we strive to have less than 5% of the total boxes with 1 or more corrections (which means 95 out of 100 are completely clean!), and less than 0.2% of overall production labor time. We accomplished both of these goals 3 out of a previous 4 weeks. With the doubling of DES DCSE, we experienced some growing pains, and are now getting closer back to goal.

4. Volume Goals– As production volume fluctuates with active projects from day-to-day, or week-to-week, daily output goals are established (mostly measured in total boxes) for each team. This helps ensure on time delivery, as well as maintaining short cycle times, and balancing the task queues. This report is produced every morning with the previous day’s box output and reviewed by the Team Managers in a quick stand up meeting to collaborate any needed adjustments for the current day.

These reporting tools are truly a big differentiator in our success.

Special thanks to our Quality Manager Harry Schlesselman - and Project Manager Dusty Vokacek - in continually improving and executing the reporting. Much appreciation to our Team Managers: Dee Ritter, Robert Champe, and Mike Coca, in your passion to improve and use the reporting metrics as an ongoing tool for improvement. Remember, a winning performance is a measured performance!

Since the beginning of 2012, ICM has been very busy with product announcements, an expansion of our scanning facilities, and increased exposure with our new website and social media accounts. Here are some of the highlights:

Our new worklow product allows you to enhance the efficiency of your operations by automating and re-engineering your document management processes. We take silos of information and applications and integrate them together to optimize your workplace. Used in conjunction with ICM's ViewCenter, the possibilities of completely enhancing and streamlining your processes and document storage are limitless!

Our reliable, convenient, and efficient Document Management System (DMS) has been enhanced with improved flexibility, additional features, and an easy-to-use help system that provides simple instructions and keyword searches for virtually all operations.

Our overall scanning capacity for our paper and film scanning operations now exceeds over 15 million images per month. Also, within the past year we've upgraded all aspects of our hardware and software with the latest technology in film scanning, allowing us to offer even more competitive pricing without compromising quality.

Brand-new website and revamped social media pages.
To stay connected with ICM, check out our new website, which we are in the process of modernizing and rebuilding with increased readability, better navigation, and educational videos that take you behind the scenes of our operations and people. Follow us on our Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter pages, which we will be updating with new case studies, videos, blogs, and more.]]> http://www.icmdocs.com/news/wins-for-icm-in-2012.html/feed 0 http://www.icmdocs.com/white-papers/student-records-retention-program.html?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=student-records-retention-program http://www.icmdocs.com/white-papers/student-records-retention-program.html#comments Mon, 14 May 2012 17:35:47 +0000 admin http://www.icmdocs.com/?p=576 Educational institutions across the nation are faced with the need of effectively managing and protecting vital student information like never before. In addition to the demands for state reporting related to the funding for schools and districts, there are extensive requirements for accountability and federal program reporting. Required student records (regular and special education) must be prepared in a manner consistent with State and Federal laws and must follow the requirements of the Arizona Uniform System of Financial Records (USFR) and those of the Arizona State Library, Archives and Public Records.

Additionally, retention periods and the disposition of records must follow specifications in the U.S.F.R., the Arizoa State Library, Archives and Public Records, and relevant Federal statutes and regulations. To make matters more complicated, educational agencies must comply with the provisions of the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA), the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA), USA Patriot Act, and the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 regarding the establishment, maintenance, correction, and destruction of student records.

A records retention schedule is a valuable reference and management tool used to define the records of an organization, establish a specific record’s life cycle, determine when to retire records, and provide the authorization for a record’s disposition. A.R.S. §41-1346 requires that each state and local entity submit a proposed retention and disposition schedule to the Arizona State Library, Archives and Public Records for approval.

In order to streamline paper-based processes and implement retention and disposition schedules, educational institutions and organizations have invested in electronic document management solutions to maintain their student information. By converting paper student records into electronic files and managing them on a document repository, organizations can take control of their record inventory, provide secure access to files by authorized staff and departments, and properly execute retention and disposition schedules. Additionally, an electronic document management system can help an organization improve audits, facilitate compliance measures, and execute practices that ensure future compliance.