Document Scanning Services: Summer Help Can Be a Win/Win

Searching for document scanning services near me? Pro tips ahead!

If document scanning services are on the horizon for your business, summer break and student job searches may give you a head start. As we turn our calendars to the month of May, we realize that children only have a few days or weeks remaining in their school year. Students will soon be returning from college and will quickly empty their parents’ refrigerators, and add to the pile of laundry to be done. One of the first questions parents will ask is, “Where are you going to work this summer?”

With the summer break being only 10-12 weeks long, these young adults are often very motivated to earn as much money as possible to cover tuition, books, food, and rent before heading back to campus in August or September. This provides a great opportunity for businesses to use this young and energetic workforce to address document scanning initiatives.

Three key considerations for getting a head start on document scanning this summer

Here are three key points to consider that can help your summer help project to be successful.

Consider hiring children of your existing employees

Having utilized summer student staffing for many years, I have found that hiring children of existing employees is a great approach. Employees appreciate the fact that their child has a job waiting for them when they return home and one which is for whom they trust the most: their own employer. It provides an opportunity for carpooling too, which helps families save costs and reduce their carbon footprint. Most importantly, the students have a greater sense of responsibility by working at their parent’s employer—they certainly do not want to make Mom or Dad look bad. If the same students return to work multiple summers or during their holiday or spring break, they will already be trained, saving valuable time.

Keep it simple; use summer staff for document prep

When it comes to document scanning, the initial step of performing document prep to get records ready for scanning is the most time-consuming part of the process because there is no automation. This also makes it the most expensive part of the process.

It is not uncommon for staple pulling, taping, and unfolding pages to account for 30-50% of the overall cost of a scanning project.

Training summer staff to properly prep records is relatively simple, and once learned it is a repetitive task for each box of records. Depending upon the intensity of the prep and the length of a workday, a single person could prep two to four boxes or more each day. Over the course of an entire summer that adds up to more than 100 boxes completed by each staff member. This will save a business thousands of dollars compared to outsourcing the document prep.

Summer staff for scanning and quality control is risky

By having a low-cost pool of labor, it may seem like a logical idea to have summer staff also scan documents and perform quality control on the scanned images. There are some risks that need to be considered. The process of evaluating the quality of a scanned image is very subjective. All staff members must have the same point of view in making image quality decisions so that the finished digital product is consistent no matter who completed the work. The risk increases if hardcopy documents are being shredded shortly after scanning; the finished images are the only record you will now have.

Outsourcing with a trusted document scanning services partner like EO Johnson is the best recommendation here. Both scanning and quality control are contracted services, so the document scanning partner can be held accountable. If the finished product does not meet the customer’s standards, corrections are made to ensure complete satisfaction.

Using summer staff for these critical job steps can be risky. When staff leaves at the end of the summer and the finished product is not good, it is difficult to have accountability compared to contracting with an outsourced partner.

Considering document scanning services? We can help.

Understanding the benefits of going virtually paperless and digitizing your documents is easy. But, knowing exactly how and where to start may seem challenging. The use of summer help staffing for document scanning is a great approach that provides considerable cost savings. And if you're looking for document scanning services near me, EO Johnson can help by working together with your business to create a strategic plan to utilize this workforce and provide training for them to be successful. Our goal is to develop solutions that address your specific needs and make the transition to a paperless office seamless and cost-effective for you and your staff.

Want to know more about controlling costs for document scanning, or document scanning services we can provide to support your business? Contact us; we'd be delighted to walk you through the products and services we provide related to document scanning.