Shipping documents should be a fast and efficient process in today’s electronic, networked business environment. With the convenience and attractive return rate of a fast scanner, this is more than ever the future for every kind of organization, large or small.

However, many businesses have been unable to eliminate shipping of paper documents. According to Office Space Across the World 2008, the average cost to send a package via courier is between $8 and $15. In addition to the Postal Service, FedEx, UPS, and other couriers, fleets of bike messengers continue to hand-carry signed documents between buildings in America’s great cities, a primitive, if effective, solution.

Electronic conversion of documents can benefit organizations by cutting back on these costs.  Collaboration and sharing is near instantaneous with the transfer of electronic documents, facilitated by Adobe’s PDF security protocols, and the ability of a scanner to quickly acquire a digitized image of a document to FTP or send by e-mail.

With a reliable scanner and a filing protocol using keywords and topics, whole cabinets full of files can quickly be converted into PDFs, or saved as editable text documents in Microsoft Word, or Excel. The PDFs can be password-protected for the highest security.

Furthermore, electronic documents, especially PDFs, are increasingly accepted as legal and binding for contracts and other critical business uses. When an office scans and saves all its documents as PDFs, it not only recovers the square footage formerly taken up by file cabinets – it also becomes agile and efficient, able to e-mail or FTP a contract, white paper, report or opinion quickly to a partner or client.

Megan Fowler
Marketing Communications Manager
Fujitsu Computer Products of America, Inc.