Today, business is more competitive than ever. The need to provide employees with the best tools to do business in a financially limited environment is a constant challenge. The debate over “going in-house” versus “outsourcing” has run on for years with companies doing one or the other, or both. For your business, the decision is even more difficult if you have an existing set of records and no equipment or expertise left in the office to handle the responsibility.
The benefits of outsourcing include:
Technology Migration:
Anytime a company invests in hardware and software to solve an internal infrastructure issue, it stakes its claim in time. If you buy equipment that can handle your backfile, it will be too much for the daily work. If you buy equipment to handle your daily volumes, it will never survive the backfile. When comparing how that reinvestment affects your cost per image compared to the same migration by a document imaging company, the effect is obvious. A document scanning company not only justifies upgrades more easily, but also has a requirement to stay current with technology to support the growth of new clients. An internal operation has no pressure to stay current with technology and a negative incentive to re-invest in hardware. The result: in-house operations struggle over time with solutions that are supported less and less and with hardware that also becomes less reliable to the point of failure. The way this affects the end user is obvious. A declining quality of experience with the solution that reduces the value of the service provided.
Reworks:
Every mistake made in the imaging process costs the business money in added labor and increasing backlogs. When you use a document imaging company, the same opportunities for mistakes exist, but now it is not your financial concern. A company that you have hired must deal with the headaches and issues caused by an equipment failure or employee error. However, because our employees have an average of more than 4 years experience with document conversion, our rework rates are very low, making us more competitive than an in-house department over time.
On-going Training:
Our employees are learning new techniques and strategies for document management as we build better solutions for our clients. The need to keep up with technology extends beyond our hardware and software upgrades. It also includes our key people and our scanning and data entry operators. By working closely with our operations staff, we can provide procedures and methods for a client which continue to make them more efficient and more productive than they were in their in-house environment.
Scheduling:
Within most corporate structures, the flexibility of scheduling is already reduced somewhat. With a small in-house operation, your options are even more limited. With only one workstation used for capture and data entry, your ability to alter workflow and focus effort on a problem area only results in work piling up in some other area. With a document imaging company, we bring the abilities of a dozen in-house operations to bear on our needs for our clients. If you need a big project done as soon as possible, we have the ability to schedule our entire staff on your project for a period of time, creating enormous opportunities for quick turnaround and backlog management that just do not exist for the in-house department.
Production Spikes:
An in-house operation can be up to date with its work and then get quickly overwhelmed by a quarterly mutual fund statement shipment. These events inevitably lead to backlog and management headaches trying to unravel a big project, while at the same time supporting the on-going work. Without additional resources, the in-house manager is trapped with either falling behind or getting extra help. Document imaging companies are already prepared for the fire drill of a big project. We have the additional equipment and employees who have the flexibility and cross training to get the job done without any additional cost or headaches to your company.
In summary, outsourcing gives greater stability, less headaches and a more cost effective solution for document imaging than most in-house operations are capable of. With limited resources, isolated from the experience of other companies and without the pressure of competition, the in-house department cannot be as motivated or as focused on the needs of the company with the same intensity as a document imaging company over a long period of time. Since imaging is a solution meant to last for years or decades, outsourcing provides a host of benefits and flexibility that ultimately outweighs the concerns of sending your documents outside for conversion.