Document Imaging Pricing Factors
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What is document imaging pricing? Depending on whether you're a supplier of document imaging services, or a consumer, it can mean what you get or what you pay.
If you're a document imaging service supplier, you have to find ways to keep your costs low to offer competitive prices to your customers. On the other hand, if you're a consumer of document imaging services, you shop around for the best document imaging prices, and look for the optimum mix of imaging and incidental services that minimize your costs while meeting your needs.
Let us look at the specific factors that affect document imaging pricing.
The Quality of Document Imaging Services
Document imaging involves scanning original paper documents and converting them into scanned images. These images can be of varying quality depending on the type and quality of the original documents. To produce uniformly high-quality documents when original documents are of varying quality, the operators need to adjust scanning parameters expertly to suit the particular paper document.
Such individual attention to each document is a labor-intensive process that increases the cost of document imaging, and pricing. The cost is further increased by the need to employ skilled persons able to adjust the scanning parameters correctly to suit each document.
Document imaging involves not only scanning, but also optical character recognition or OCR. OCR converts the text in the scanned images into computer-readable text. When the original documents contain handwritten characters, or foreign-language characters, the OCR process might produce unreliable results. You then need higher-cost OCR software to produce acceptable results in such cases.
OCR results can be in different formats, such as ASCII text, rich text, etc. Again, you will need to pay more for software that can handle such varied formats.
The Range of Services Required
In practice, document imaging consists of more than scanning and OCR. Several other incidental services are typically required to deliver satisfactory results. The following are some examples of such incidental services:
- Handling multipage, stapled, or bound documents involve removing the staples or bindings, scanning each sheet (single side or both sides), ordering the scanned pages and originals into the original sequence, and stapling or binding them again
- Handling the submission of documents from different departments and persons, keeping track of each customer, and delivering the scanned results in agreed-upon formats such as PDF or XML on CDs
Document imaging costs and prices will vary with the range of services involved, whether you do these in-house or outsource them to external service providers.
Costs of Equipment
You can go for a simple desktop scanner that handles A4 size sheets individually or a complete workstation that includes an industrial scanner with automatic sheet feeding, OCR, sorting, and collating. The workstation will definitely be far more expensive, and can be justified only if there is a heavy volume of document imaging work.
OCR software will also vary in costs depending on its reliability while handing different kinds of original characters and also on the variety of character formats it can deal with.
Document imaging pricing is thus a highly variable element depending on the kinds of factors illustrated above.
About the Author
Ademero, Inc. develops document archiving software. Visit their website devoted to document archiving software. Browse the resources section which includes the largest collection of posts from real users reviewing all of the most popular Document Imaging Pricing factors.
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