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Millennia Group Blog

Gym Shoes Required

Gym Shoes Required

I would love to talk about how electronic document management could supercharge your company sales or revenue, but it always seems like it is too hard to connect all the dots. Instead most prospects and customers think “what will this cost me?”

We are always looking at what it costs to create, store, share, ship and scan documents. This calculation is more challenging than ever since there is now both paper and digital storage, cloud and on premise storage, off-site storage and yes, some day, unmanned vehicles delivering documents to your door.

Millennia Group has it’s own hosted document management system called FileStar. It would be considered a private cloud application. FileStar is used for workflow, imaging, compliance, reporting and digital file archive and retrieval. We have analyzed the cost of FileStar for our customers and there are many impressive stats, but one in particular stands out – cost per view.

Our heavy use customers have a cost per document viewed of less than $0.10 with many customers at $0.50 or less. Think about that, less than $0.10 per view. Compare that to the cost of simply going to a file cabinet to pull a document for viewing. For an employee earning $40,000 per year, they would have ten seconds to get to the file cabinet and ten seconds to get back to their desk. I hope your dress code allows gym shoes.

And if your cost per view is higher, factor in the disaster recovery benefits, the absence of lost documents, the avoidance of copying and shipping costs and of course the compliance benefits of user tracking. Lastly, factor in the positive customer experience as a result of getting an answer quickly and you can see why electronic document management shouldn’t be looked at as a cost but as a real opportunity.

Please contact us for more information or to get started today

For more information on Millennia Group, please go to www.mgdocs.com or email us at info@mgdocs.com

Business Process Automation – How is your Company Doing?

According to Wikipedia, Business Process Automation (BPA) is “the strategy a business uses to automate processes in order to contain costs. It consists of integrating applications, restructuring labor resources and using software applications throughout the organization.”

BPA, as you can see, is a broad definition and sounds like a massive undertaking. Yet companies successfully complete “BPA projects” – knowingly or unknowingly – all the time.

Examples of simple BPA projects include:

  • Accepting orders via online form (replacing the use of a fax machine or order clerk answering the phone)
  • Replacing monthly sales reports created manually in Excel with automated reports and dashboards created by CRM software like Salesforce
  • Using Mail Merge to deliver customized marketing materials to customers and prospects

On the other extreme are highly sophisticated BPA tools that have completely automated an entire industry – Netflix being a prime case study. Netflix was a game changer that radically altered the movie distribution landscape and generated billions in revenues for the company.

Not every BPA tool or process in your business will have results like Netflix. But you can expect well designed ones to have an ROI of 100% or more within a year.

Here are three other examples of processes that typically have a very high ROI:

  1. Accounts Payable Process – Converting a paper and labor intensive process with a digital workflow. This process typically involves scanning of the invoices at the moment of receipt, capturing enough information from the invoice to ensure proper routing to the responsible party. The end result of this process is that invoices are in the system faster and discounts can be taken, invoices don’t get lost or incur late payments, invoices are now digital and easily searchable.
  2. Contract management – Many companies use a contract management system to manage the critical dates and compliance issues for each customer contract. These systems can be a simple database of the critical dates all the way to a full workflow from initial contact creation with the prospect all the way to final execution of the contract. Many contract management systems will now incorporate digital signature capabilities, templates for new agreements and even clause libraries for very sophisticated contract creation and delivery.
  3. Vendor Onboarding – Every company has vendors and many larger companies have thousands if not tens of thousands of vendors. With so many new financial regulations and industry regulations it is now almost impossible for a large company to not have an onboarding process in place. These systems ensure that all required documents are collected, government mandates for minority or special class hiring are met and optimally the most qualified vendor is hired. Achieving compliance in this global business world is almost impossible with a paper based process.

Talk to Millennia. Tell us about your most cumbersome, paper-intensive, human capital consuming processes. We’ll bring our best ideas and technologies to help you turn those high risk, high cost situations into productivity and cash.

For more information on Millennia Group, please go to www.mgdocs.com or email us at info@mgdocs.com

Organize, Consolidate and Share

Most businesses that we see operate with multiple information silos. From paper documents in file cabinets and files in shared directories on a server to files loaded in cloud storage and of course files on each employee’s computer.

It should be every company’s goal to consolidate all those silos into an efficient repository of critical business information that lets the company operate at peak performance.

Although most companies would claim they are accomplishing that goal by using data warehouses (CRM, Accounting and ERP systems), the real problem still looms below the surface.

The challenge arises when information needs to be sourced from documents (contracts, invoices, drawings, manuals, reports, legal documents, employee documents) and the myriad of documents that still represent an important part of a business.

When information is difficult to find, two things happen. First, immense time is burned up searching. Second, poor decisions get made for lack of information.

This need for information can be a recurring event in an ongoing business process like contract management, project management or financial reporting. This can become a very costly situation since it is happening on a daily basis.

There are also event-driven needs for data – such as when there is an audit or special project. In these situations, it is not uncommon for the entire office to shut down while the hunt for information ensues. Since such a search typically involves everyone from staff to executives, the costs become astronomical.

When all else fail, decisions are made in a vacuum of information – and risks increase. This risk is magnified when there is a merger or acquisition of another company. Not only is it likely that the acquired company had multiple silos of information, but the nomenclature and filing structure may be very different than that of the acquiring company.

Imagine having just one closet in your house – and no matter what you are searching for, it magically appears when you open the door. Whether it’s your coat, the car keys, your golf clubs or your running shoes. Whatever it is you are looking for – everything right where you want it. That would be a closet we’d all invest in owning.

At the office, we would all appreciate a similar scenario though wouldn’t we? A “folder” on our desktop – and no matter what it was we needed to find, it was always in that folder. This utopia may not be exactly possible – but at Millennia Group, we’ve come pretty close.

We start by cleaning up and consolidating the existing silos of information you have (shared drives, cloud storage, paper documents) into something more meaningful and effective. We even create rules and procedures for going forward (commonly known as Information Governance). Once we’re done, every piece of information you need will be instantly available – and you’ll have the confidence to know the information is complete and actionable.

Millennia Group has the tools and experience to help you organize, consolidate and share the information so that the information is where you expect it, when you need it. Whether your issue is ongoing or due to an acquisition, we can help. We can also help you design and implement an information governance strategy to keep your company operating at peak profitability and efficiency.

Talk to us today about your biggest data access headache – and let us bring that “magic closet” concept into your company – just like we have for some of the biggest companies in America.

Talk to us today about your biggest data access headache – and let us bring that “magic closet” concept into your company – just like we have for some of the biggest companies in America.

For more information on Millennia Group, please go to www.mgdocs.com or email us at info@mgdocs.com

We Have Seen the Light, and We Want You to See it Too

We have been busy searching for the meaning of Scanning so to speak. Millennia Group has been a scanning service bureau or scanning services company for 17 years now. We have always put customer first and that has meant providing our valued customers with scanning services that they wanted and were willing to fund. There is no question that when the economy was really good, the willingness to fund scanning projects was far greater than it is today. The underlying reasons to scan have not changed, but the willingness to fund them has, shall we say, tightened up a bit. And we understand that. This has caused us and our clients to look deeply at the reasons for a scanning project. The results of that look are really not surprising.

What we have come to fully embrace and advocate is that scanning needs to be looked at as part of business process improvement. Scanning is not a means to empty a basement full of boxes or to Go Paperless. Scanning is also not just a means to satisfy the disaster recovery team or to eliminate some file cabinets. While it is true that those things can be the result of scanning, scanning must be tied to business process improvement to get past the justifiable financial scrutiny.

For this reason, over the past year, we have been starting the conversation with companies that call and want us to “scan all of their documents” with this simple question – Why? What is this project going to do to improve your business? Will it turn a paper based routing and approval process into a paperless process with tracking, notices and an audit trail? Yes, we are on board and we can help you with that. Will it give your dispersed and mobile workforce better access to customer and project documentation and let those remote users upload new documents? Yes, we are on board with this too and we can definitely help.

Be willing to have a thick skin and maybe look hard at some internal processes that may not be optimal or in fact broken. Embrace some well thought out change. Now scanning is really going to improve your business. Will a centralized, trusted, online repository of your business documents empower your mobile or dispersed workforce? Yes, we can help get your there.

Contact us today for more information or to get started today

For more information on Millennia Group, please go to www.mgdocs.com or email us at info@mgdocs.com

Checklist Length Doesn’t Matter

We have been very busy meeting with people in a variety of companies and disciplines but one area that has taken great interest in our online document checklist continues to rise to the top and that is human resources. When we meet with someone in the human resources world and we start to describe the concept of an online checklist that helps you track and gather a set of required documents, we have been surprised by a simple response – we need to collect one or two documents from many employees.

The concept of an online document gathering system seemed to us to mean a list of many documents that needed to be collected and because it may be a long list or at least a list used over and over again, some control, organization and automation would be really helpful. Turns out, it is very helpful in those situations but a short list sent to many people is also difficult to manage and our system can help with that too.

For instance, a company with a division of 300 employees in a state that changes insurance requirements means sending out new disclosure forms and beneficiary designation forms to all of those employees and gathering up all the signed copies. That is a lot of email and file attachments and a nightmare to monitor and manage. Well, not with CollectDocs. Load the list of employees and the blank forms and send out a batch Request and let the system tell you when all files are collected. Simple. Even simpler with digital signatures.

Contact us today for more information or to get started today

For more information on Millennia Group, please go to www.mgdocs.com or email us at info@mgdocs.com

A Slippery Slope

Our blog title – “Tackling Mountains of Docs” is very top of mind lately. We have just launched a new service aimed squarely at Iron Mountain – controller of mountains of boxes of documents. Our service is a combination of technology, hard work and process but in the end, it is just common sense. We call our new service I:S Cubed as in Inventory: Scan, Shred or Store.

The point of the service is if you use some basic logic in making decisions, it is not all that painful to make that decision. Iron Mountain and other box storage firms have grown very large and accumulated a vast amount of boxes because its difficult to make decisions about the mysterious contents. Rather than sweep the boxes under the rug so to speak, take back control. As our service clearly states, start with taking an inventory. Find out what is in those boxes. Once you have the inventory you can make the decisions that need to be made – Scan, Shred or Store.

You should compare that inventory to your records retention schedule or at the very least talk to your accountant and attorney to find out best practices for retention of various document types. Armed with this information you will find it easy to make good, common sense decisions. You will not only save money in the long run, you will be surprised at the important corporate knowledge that you find and you will sleep better knowing you are effectively managing your litigation exposure.

If you are just starting to accumulate boxes in off-site storage, keep a very detailed inventory in a database or spreadsheet. Don’t start sliding down that slippery slope.

Contact us today for more information or to get started today

For more information on Millennia Group, please go to www.mgdocs.com or email us at info@mgdocs.com

It’s Not about the Scanning

Almost every inquiry we receive regarding a potential scanning project includes a discussion and focus on the scan resolution (commonly referred to as Dots Per Inch, DPI), file type (PDF or TIFF), logistics of pickup and drop off, prep and re-assembly. Very few of the discussions initially focus on the indexing or categorization and organization of the files. It is mostly an afterthought by the potential customer, as if the entire project is all about the conversion and not about how they can benefit from having the documents easily accessible.

Over the years we have determined that the value of our services is not really in the quality of the scans or how well we re-assemble. We know we do those things very well and those project elements are critical to a successful conversion. But the real value in what Millennia Group provides is the organization and rationalization of the information so that users can find what they need quickly and have confidence that they have the full picture.

Let me describe a scenario that is fairly typical. I have used employee files in the example, but the concept is the same for all types of files and records. Let’s assume a company has 2,000 employees and their employee files consist of personnel records, benefits documents, I-9’s and all the other documents typically found in the employees folder or folders. Many companies will look at these files and start scanning the documents because it seems simple to have a temp just scan each employee folder as one PDF file and save it to a network drive. So that one PDF for that one employee has all the documents in it including the I-9. Let’s say that file is for Mary Adams, so it is saved as maryadams.pdf. Seems pretty straight forward.

Looks can be deceiving. First of all, Mary gets married and is now Mary Reynolds. Hopefully someone will remember to manually go and rename the PDF to maryreynolds.pdf. Secondly, if there is an audit of the I-9’s, they will have to go dig out the paper files because the auditors should not have access to all the other documents in the PDF like the background check or the medical information. How about the fact that managers really should only have access to the employees in their region, not easy to do on a shared folder on the network. How about the annual review PDF’s that are stored in a different location on the network? Should those be merged into the other PDF for Mary or should users just know to go look somewhere else? How about terminated employees, are their files moved to a different location in the shared folder so that the retention schedule can be activated? Would anyone ever like to audit the files of all employees in a particular office? Can’t be done if they are named the way we named the PDFs.

These are just some of the reasons that organization and indexing are so important in every scanning project. This effort is what really justifies the cost of scanning – cost savings from more accessible and complete information.

Contact us today for more information or to get started today

For more information on Millennia Group, please go to www.mgdocs.com or email us at info@mgdocs.com

One Super Versatile Tool

The concept of putting a checklist application online and incorporating file attachments has really sparked a great deal of interest. Like our last post, the interest has come from business areas that we did not anticipate. Therefore, we are starting to casually refer to CollectDocs as the Duct Tape application – it has a million uses.

The number of uses has increased with our addition of Tasks and Data collection to the types of items that can be part of a checklist. When CollectDocs was first created, it only allowed items to be file attachments. Now a checklist can be file attachments combined with some tasks that need to be completed and even some data points that need gathering. Behold, a simple workflow tool.

  • Tax preparer – use it for collecting the client’s w2’s, 1099’s, real estate taxes and other receipts and documentation
  • Accounting Department – use it to gather all the sub-reports needed for the quarterly financial statement preparation
  • HR Department – use it to gather the on-boarding or new hire documents
  • Procurement Officer – use it to gather the w-9, ISO certifications, materials content statement, the contract, the NDA, etc
  • Leasing Agent – use it to gather the background check, the lease, the prior landlord recommendation, the income verification, etc

And on and on. Such a simple idea that every company uses throughout the organization only now it has actual functionality and can significantly improve a process.

If you use a paper checklist or a folder system on the shared drive to manage the collection of information, we would love to hear what that process is. Thank you.

Contact us today for more information or to get started today

For more information on Millennia Group, please go to www.mgdocs.com or email us at info@mgdocs.com

When is a Million Not a Million and Who Cares?

Most of our customers and prospects look at a wall of file cabinets or room full of boxes and immediately think “there must be a million pages here”. They may be right, but they may be wrong. The correct answer or as close as you can get to the correct answer is extremely important in terms of the total cost of your imaging project and justifying your project.

If the cost to scan, prep, index and re-assemble (I don’t like just saying the “cost to scan”, since scanning is far more complicated than a single step) is $0.10 per page it makes a big difference if you have 1,000,000 pages or 100,000 pages. There is a huge difference between a budget of $100,000 and $10,000. As an example of how important page count is to the total project budget lets see what the budget is if we increase the cost per page by 50%.

If the project includes 100,000 pages and the cost per page increases by 50% to $0.15 per page, the budget increases from $10,000 to $15,000. $5,000 is a lot of money, but that difference is not usually a show stopper. So if a prospect call us and says “I need a quote to scan 100,000 pages”, we can misjudge the complexity of the project by 50% and not really jeopardize the budget or shock the prospect.

If the prospect had said, “I think we must have 1,000,000 pages to scan”, then it really doesn’t matter what the price per page is, the nominal amount of the budget increases so dramatically that it does become a show stopper. Of course 1,000,000 pages at $0.10 is $100,000, much different than $10,000. Even if we are off on the price by 50%, $150,000 is really not in a different league than $100,000.

This is why page count is so important. Take a close look at the documents in the file cabinets and in the boxes. Maybe there are documents that really don’t need to be scanned, which may significantly reduce page count. Take some test counts of the pages in each box or each folder and try to accurately extrapolate out the total number of actual pages that will be scanned. You might also be able to split the project into smaller parts to spread the budget out over a longer period of time.

Price per page is important and there are many variables that go into the cost of any project. However, an accurate estimate of the total page count will typically have the largest impact on total project cost.

Contact us today for more information or to get started today

For more information on Millennia Group, please go to www.mgdocs.com or email us at info@mgdocs.com

Compliance and Audit – Imaging Helps

Two business areas that can benefit, or suffer, from imaging are compliance and audits. Here is why – unless your imaging process is tightly controlled, the risk of mis-information is equal to or greater than a paper based system. What could be some control points. Centralized scanning could be. This might create a bit more consistency in how documents are classified and saved vs leaving that task up to every individual user in the company. There will undoubtedly be spelling errors, mis-interpretations, mistakes and duplicated efforts, some of which might go away with centralized operations. A review step can also help, but that adds a layer of management and cost on the process. Structured file names. Can work, but round things don’t always fit into square holes nicely. Workflow rules. That is a great way to ensure consistency and accuracy. A component of Workflow is source data as in matching invoices to the source accounting entry in the accounting system or matching the contract to the customer in the CRM. More to come.

Contact us today for more information or to get started today

For more information on Millennia Group, please go to www.mgdocs.com or email us at info@mgdocs.com