There are many options which vary based upon price and volume, but before considering a solution there are 2 important factors that need to be addressed:

1. How do I minimise the use of paper documents?

2. Is the new system going to simply or complicate existing processes?

First you need to consider your customers and your business processes. If your customers need to complete a document or send you a letter encourage them to fax it to you, and implement a fax to email solution. [*1] Secondly have a look at how you can replace paper letters with faxes or emails, make sure that if you are sending faxes you fax directly from your desktop or even better, directly from your CRM Software or customer database. Remember a fax always prints, an email doesn’t!

All in all make sure all correspondence (faxes, emails, SMS, quotes, letters, documents, brochures etc.) internally and in and out of the organisation can be Electronically Generated, Stored and Delivered AUTOMATICALLY.

If you simply implement a document scanner and don’t address the benefits above are you really improving? Also where will you scan these documents to? In the office of yesterday we kept a folder for each customer and in this folder we stored everything such as letters, faxes, documents, pictures etc. So when you scan these documents are they going to be stored as individual files? Let me guess, you will copy them into customer specific folders? Then you will save your emails and faxes there as well? Allot of manual administration, will everybody adhere to it? Why not implement a solution that enables you to store all your customer data under the control of your database, this way your customer database will keep track of all your customer documents and be able to present it in a logical way. 3GBuiness CRM provides you with numerous features to manage all forms of documents and correspondence, it even automatically generates emails, faxes, sms, letters and quotes. For more information visit http://www.3gb.com.au/crm_documentation_management.asp

You can even go one step further and set-up your scanner to scan documents directly to your customer database, eliminating the need to manually attaching it.

So now that you understand some of the issues associated with document scanning what scanners should you use? If budget permits I recommend the Canon FAX L2000ip due to:

· Fax and Scanner

· Network Scanner and Internet Fax

· Document feeder

· Scan 50 pages p/m

Specs: http://www.canon.co.uk/For_Home/Product_Finder/Fax/Laser/FAX-L2000IP/index.asp?specs=1  

*1 - I highly recommend outsourcing your entire fax system. You will be provided with numerous fax lines (for a price less than 1), you won’t have to pay monthly line rental or for multiple lines, all incoming faxes are free and they are automatically converted to PDF, faxes are labelled with CLI and other important information, some providers offer OCR and colour faxing and best of all in some countries like Australia you can send a fax anywhere in Australia irrespective of 1 page or a 100 pages all for a fixed price of 18 cents. (Have a look at Traitel for sending and receiving faxes in Australia)

To qualify for our volume based discount please enter the special offer code: TTF568AGVFX7541