Business problem solved – Tracking physical documents in an electronic document management system

Keeping physical records part of your library.

The Pain

You work in your municipality’s civil engineering office. Recently, the city decided to move to a document management software to convert the archives to paperless. While city council minutes may be simple candidates for online storage, you have thousands of blueprints and planning charts that comprise the key information planners need. Scanning them all with take hundreds of hours, but you need to be able to start getting these records online now. How do you make these accessible without rushing the process?

The Solution – Offline Document Schema Formats in FileHold

As you add your documents to FileHold, you will assign them to a schema. This lets you control what metadata tags each document would have. The tags can be anything – invoice number, expiration dates, social security numbers – whatever data you need to sort your files by, you can tag it to your document. However, sometimes you need to track information for things that cannot be digitally stored. They could be physical items, large format documents that won’t scan conventionally, large paper files that will take too long to run through the scanner, or capital assets that need to be tracked and designated. FileHold lets you assign document schema to offline objects as well as online documents.

Search more than documents

Since metadata tags are user defined, you could create labels for any aspect of a document. Offline items can carry this same information as online documents. For instance, a series of binders on outdated policy may need to be kept for regulatory compliance, but has yet to be scanned. If searched for remotely, the metadata tags could tell the user what the general contents of the file were, when they were used, and any other information that may be useful. Like a library card catalogue, and perhaps most importantly, the tags can also show where the binders are located, or their condition, or how many pages there are – whatever is useful to help someone find them. At this time, no-one is able to actually digitize your physical object, but at least FileHold can tell you where it is!

Keep track of offline goods

Like online documents, offline items can be “checked out” from FileHold. This lets you keep track of who borrowed the items and when, so you can track their return. It also helps that when you check the item in, the physical location would be part of the metadata, so refiling is simple. FileHold can also generate printable barcode labels for organizations to make the labeling of items easy.

Covert your items

As your organizations becomes more paperless, offline records can be converted to electronic documents in the system. The oversized blueprints can be scanned and turned into detailed PDFs – and the offline schema is reassigned to the new record with minimal translation. Binders can be scanned, with their information captured through optical character recognition (OCR) to create searchable indexes of information to enhance the digital record.

Business Problem Solved

With FileHold, you can create offline records for all the rolled-up drawings that lets you search for critical terms, find where they are stored, and see if they are checked out. Next fiscal, if you get that large format scanner, you will be able to quickly convert your offline schema one by one into online documents. Until then, you can use the same document management system to have online and offline records working for you. To learn more about offline record management and the other organizational features of FileHold DMS, contact sales@filehold.com.