Employee records are incredibly important in order to make sure your employees are safe and qualified, but they are also important for your company’s organizational needs. Your HR department is in charge of those records, ensuring that they are complete and accessible at all times. These records contain sensitive files like medical records, employment history, payroll information, emergency contacts, and more information that if destroyed or stolen, could endanger the company and the employee. Paper records simply can’t stand up to these human or environmental factors. Here are seven reasons to digitize employee record management.
Category Archives: Document Management
It’s Time to Update That Outdated Microfilm and Microfiche
It’s time to say it: microfilm and microfiche are outdated. In fact, they’re actually in the Museum of Obsolete Media. So as you plan for the future of your company, maybe microfilm and microfiche shouldn’t be in the picture. After all, it’s important to make sure that you, your employees, clients, and anyone who may need information in the future has accessibility of important documents.
Even if the Museum of Obsolete Media doesn’t convince you, there are still plenty of reasons why microfilm and microfiche aren’t the best choice for information longevity.
You Need Continuously Trained Personnel
If your company continues storing records in these forms, you will need to rely on one or two people who know how to access, process, and store microfilm and microfiche. Continuously retraining people to work with these formats is tedious and time-consuming. By scanning and converting your outdated microfilm, you develop one uniform process and method of storage that you can update according to changing technology. Everyone will know how to access and process important records.
You Need Special Equipment
It is also becoming more and more difficult to find the proper equipment to view microfilm and microfiche. Viewing machines are expensive, and many of the companies that sell them are going out of business. Because the writing is on the wall, there are no new providers to replace those that have closed, which will, in time, phase out microfilm and microfiche readers completely. It wont be long before viewing machines are commercially unavailable.
You Need to Consider Storage Logistics
Accessing and storing microfilm and microfiche are problems that many organizations face as well. Finding the right rolls in a room full of them can take hours, whereas finding digitized records takes a few clicks of a mouse. Rather than spending valuable time attempting to find a single record, employees can stay on task and increase productivity. Furthermore, where you store microfilm can affect its longevity. If conditions aren’t perfectly dry and dark, microfilm can mold and disintegrate from moisture in the air, ruining those records forever.
So what’s the better way to store information?
Newer and more convenient scanning and conversion technology is quickly making microfilm and microfiche obsolete. In order to best protect your records and your company, digitize your microfilm and microfiche with Datamation today.
1774
publish
2018-07-24 00:00:00
its-time-to-update-your-microfilm-and-microfiche
5 Benefits of Digitizing Your Records Management
Regardless of industry, managing records correctly is the best way to ensure ongoing compliance. As your company grows and paperwork multiplies, it becomes increasingly difficult to keep track of retention dates and ensure the security of sensitive information. The best way to keep track of your paperwork and the important information it contains is to digitize your records management system.
Check out five benefits you’ll see immediately if you do.
1. You’ll comply with document retention guidelines.
Document retention is a serious matter, as non-compliance can lead to legal penalties. While some companies think that the best way to avoid these penalties is to just keep everything, keeping documents too long is just as bad as not keeping them long enough. The more information your company has in storage, the higher the likelihood of theft and leaks.
With a records management system, optical character recognition (OCR) and record indexing can be used to track record retention times automatically, alerting you when a document is eligible to be destroyed.
2. You’ll keep records safe and secure.
Storing your records in filing cabinets or boxes doesn’t provide enough security for sensitive information like financial records, health records, and employee documentation. Digitizing records keeps them under layers of password protected security, and also tracks who accesses a document and when. Automatic retention policies eliminate documents once they have passed their retention dates, reducing the potential for information breaches.
3. Your records are backed up in case of a disaster.
You can’t prevent a flood, fire, or earthquake, but you can certainly plan for one. Think about the process of recovering all of your company’s vital records. At best, its tedious, and at worst, you cant recover those records at all. Having digital copies ensures that even after an unpredictable event, you can get back on track immediately.
4. You can access documents within seconds, anytime and from any location.
Digging through dusty piles of paper to find a single record among hundreds can take valuable time out of anyone’s workday. When records are digitized, you can find them in seconds with a simple keyword search, boosting productivity and giving your employees time to focus on tasks that add value to your company.
5. Everyone is doing it.
As more businesses in a variety of industries begin to realize the scope of the benefits provided by digitization, paper management is becoming obsolete. With the ability to access records quickly, keep them secure, and even automate some of the tasks surrounding paperwork, why wouldn’t you digitize?
147
publish
2018-07-10 00:00:00
5-benefits-of-digitizing-your-records-management
4 Essential Tips for Planning an HR Document Management System
Anyone know who works in a Human Resources department knows about the time, money, and regulations associated with documents. But when you implement an HR document management system, it will lead to more efficient processes, reduced costs, time savings, and fewer tedious tasks for your staff members.
How Automated Workflows Can Benefit Any HR Department
It’s safe to say that Human Resources is the heart of nearly every company. They deal with the most important asset within any organization the people. But with an automated workflow, HR can do their work faster, easier, and at less cost to their company.
Document Conversion: Frequently Asked Questions
Whether you run a small family firm or manage a large corporation with multiple locations, document conversion can change the way you do business.
Organizing, storing, and sharing paper documents is not only inefficient, it leaves your company’s information susceptible to security breaches. Document conversion can save your company significant time, labor, and money by streamlining all your processes. This post will discuss frequently asked questions about document conversion.
When should I consider document conversion?
● When many people or departments need access to the same documents. If your business is spread across multiple locations, digitally stored documents make it easy for more than one person to have full access to a document.
● When the documents must be retained for a long period of time. These documents may include blueprints, maps, financial information, or employee records.
● When the documents are highly sensitive and/or vital to business operations and require backups. Document conversion ensures there is always a digital backup if a paper copy is destroyed.
● When storage costs exceed the cost of conversion. Consider not only the cost of storing documents at off-site facilities or cost per square foot for the space in your office, but the cost to find, retrieve, and re-store documents and the employee and client relation costs incurred when you are unable to locate a misfiled document.
What is the difference between scanning internally or outsourcing these services?
Scanning documents internally requires resources. You will need scanners, staff to prepare the documents for scanning, capture and imaging software, and staff for quality control after scanning. Consider the investment required for equipment, software, licensing, upgrades, and staffing to successfully scan your documents in-house.
Outsourcing document conversion means all the resources are provided for you. When you use Datamation, you will also have access to your documents during the conversion process and can track the progress of your project.
What does it cost to convert documents?
The cost to convert documents to digital images depends on several factors:
● How much paper do you need to scan? For reference, a standard bankers box full of paper costs between $130-$220 to scan. If you’re unsure, use our document scanning quote calculator for an estimate of your conversion costs.
● How much document prep is needed? Are the sheets full of paperclips, bindings, and tears?
● How many pages are included in each file?
● Does your company have any indexing or metadata requirements?
How do I select the best document scanning provider?
Make a list of your criteria. What are your company’s needs and wishes? Consider the following:
● Volume of paper. Can the provider accommodate the volume of documents within your timeframe?
● Do your documents need to be scanned in color, grayscale, black and white, or all of these?
● Is there a resolution requirement?
● Do the documents need to be searchable?
● Document destination. Are the documents going into a document management system?
● Image format. What format do the images need to be in?
● Do you need access to documents while the conversion process is taking place?
How do I choose a document conversion file format?
The format of your documents is usually chosen according to the ECM/ERP/EMR system where the documents will reside. The most common format is TIFF. However, if you’re using a document management system, check with your software manager because some prefer files in the PDF format.
Should I keep or destroy the documents once they are converted?
In most cases, the paper documents can be destroyed, but you should always check the legal requirements for your state and industry. Contact Datamation or your state archivist with questions.
This post is part of the Datamation Guide to Document Scanning.
1766
publish
2018-06-12 00:00:00
document-conversion-frequently-asked-questions
FERPA Compliant Cloud Storage: 5 Questions to Ask Before Switching to the Cloud
When your district is considering a cloud storage solution to protect student records, there are several things to consider in order to take inventory of what system your district currently has, how well it is working, and what needs to be changed.
Increasingly, districts have been turning to cloud-based storage to manage their student records securely, and to maintain compliance with FERPA and other regulations. Successful implementation of the cloud takes careful planning, and a clear view of your districts goals. Here are five questions to ask when your district is considering the cloud:
FERPA Violations Explained: Student Records vs. Directory Information
Under the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act, or FERPA, eligible students and parents have a right to privacy for student records. Students and parents must be able to access their records, and certain information within their records cannot be shared without written consent. There is a fine line between student information that can and cannot be shared, and school districts must take care to walk the right side of that line.
What Goes into Manual HR Onboarding?
This post is part of The Datamation Guide to Human Resources Records.
Taking on new employees in any industry is a huge undertaking. An immense amount of paperwork is needed to comply with industry and governmental regulations, which means that for each employee, that paperwork needs to be printed, filled out, and collected. Between collecting this information and entering it into your company filing system, you’re talking about several days or often weeks before all of this processing is done, and this doesn’t include fixing the mistakes that come with manual onboarding and processing.
Managing Your Files with an HR Workflow
This post is part of The Datamation Guide to Human Resources Records.
With each new employee comes a new, weighty file full of their personal records and hiring documents. The longer the employee is at the company, the bigger this file grows and the more space it takes up. If one of the documents within the file needs to be referenced, an HR employee has to go through that individual’s entire file to find that one piece of paper, which takes up time.
Onboarding each employee is a whole other story, and it involves a huge amount of paperwork that needs to be filled out, collected, and filed away. Just a few examples of necessary paperwork are medical records, banking information, emergency contact information, W-4s, I-9s, handbooks, job descriptions, references, and more. All of this information needs to be completed by the employee, and then processed.
Paper processes are simply too tedious and inefficient, but fortunately, an automated workflow easily solves all of the issues that paper presents. With an automated workflow and digitized records, employees can fill out this information using E-forms, or electronic forms, that eliminates the need to process paper. E-forms can be completed on computers, tablets, or even phones, and immediately integrated into the workflow.
Following completion, that paperwork enters the workflow. This means that all of the information that would normally have to be passed from desk to desk to be approved or entered into the system can be received and approved electronically. With less paper and less of the manual data entry that comes with the typical onboarding process, there will be less human error. Mistakes caused by human error cost your company valuable time and money. OCR (Optical Character Recognition) technology is used to extract the data from E-forms and other digitized documents, eliminating the need for staff to enter important data by hand.
Besides onboarding documents, other processes that can be automated or put into a workflow (or both) include timesheets and leave requests. Employees can submit their timesheets as they are being pushed through the workflow for eventual approval, and automatically receiving those timesheets makes it easy for your department when it comes time for payroll. Employees can fill out leave requests using E-forms, and that information can be sent to be approved automatically.
It’s not just your department that will benefit from an automated workflow—your employees will benefit, and your customers will, too. With all-around quicker processes, faster access to files, and an easier onboarding process, everyone is happy, and better yet, they are able to focus on other things within their department that could use some work. You will quickly be able to see the benefits of automation throughout your entire company. Call Datamation (630) 321-0601 today to discuss the perfect plan for your company’s needs.
1763
publish
2018-04-25 00:00:00
managing-your-files-with-an-hr-workflow