A digital office is a working environment in which information is stored and organised electronically and is easily retrievable.
The benefits of a digital office are many and can include
- Maximising productivity by reducing wasted time looking for documents
- Easier storage on hard-drives – not filing cabinets
- Instant accessibility
- Increased security.
Digital imaging is a cornerstone to delivering a streamlined digital office - allowing users to view a computer-generated image of documents instead of the original paper. While this isn’t necessarily a paperless office, it is one step closer to achieving some of the benefits and efficiencies that can come from a paperless office.
Digital office vs Paperless office
While Australian businesses are certainly becoming less reliant on physical documents, the coming of the ‘paperless office age’ has certainly not been achieved by most.
Most companies are making efforts to digitise records as much as possible and move them into commonly accessible content repositories, but they’ve also had to make peace with the fact that paper isn’t likely to go away for years, decades or maybe not ever.
For most businesses, paper trails and records need to be created and kept should anything happen, which may require them to be found. In some cases, only the physical document will be sufficient.
While paperless may not be achievable, the digital office is certainly a reachable goal.
Digital conversion and storage is the physical act of scanning every document in your archives and then saving them to a private server for quick and easy access.
Why go digital?
While the original notion was for a business to become paperless for environmental reasons, of which many are making a concerted effort to become, another reason is for efficiency. As many companies need to keep physical records for legal, tax or compliance reasons, and therefore place them in to secure storage facilities, an issue always arises when they need to be accessed.
Most of the time this begins with an email enquiry for a document, which then goes in to a queue, which may take days, if not weeks to be responded to depending on the requests in front of you. Then the document will need to be located, and someone from your office will need to go down and retrieve it from the facility.
With a digitised office, you can access archived and important documents from your very desk.
How do you go digital?
With Compu-Stor, we are able to not only store documents you want to archive, we can also digitise them through our document imaging service. Each and every one of the documents you want stored at our facilities is scanned in to on-site server. This means you will have a physical and digital copy of the same document. However, not every document has to be digitised, which means you only need to inform us of the documents you will need scanned and we can create a tailored solution for you.
Yet the best part is to come. Where once it may have taken you days or weeks to gain access to a document (or documents), you can now access them directly from your computer. Through our CIMS (Complete Information Management System) portal, you have access to all archived documents digitally.
No matter where you are located in Australia, or around the world, through the CIMS portal you can access the documents you need to conduct your business, any time that you wish.
Efficiency
Compu-Stor is all about providing you with the most efficient services to run your business. Aside from giving you a portal that helps you access archived documents with ease, the portal also has the ability to allow multiple users to access the system using a single account. No more waiting for work colleagues to log out of the account in order for you to find what you need.
You can generate and download reports, as well as search and view historical activity, enabling you to keep track of your documents and see what services and information is being accessed the most.
Combine this with the ability to be able to order storage materials such as boxes, cartons, destructions bins, scanners and box barcodes, and you have a full-service portal that can give you access to the digital and physical.
Where to next?
With Compu-Stor’s experience and skills, we can help tailor a solution to fit your business’ needs. Feel free to call us on 1300 559 778, or fill out our Online Enquiry Form and we will respond to you as soon as we possibly can.
