The importance of paper sizes and the layout in ECM

Couple of years back I was handling a document conversion project for a well known multinational. There were two main obstacles that we had to face.

1. The main document that we had to scan was in a non standard size. It was a bit longer than an A3 paper. This prevented us from using most of our scanners, since they were not capable of scanning papers longer than A3. Among all what we had, the only scanner capable of this at that time was the good old Kodak - I 260. Even for that we had to add additional RAM. (At present the problem is not that significant since there are several models of scanners that support scanning of extra-long documents. I will write about these in a separate post).

What we can learn from this is that it would be very much easy and cheaper to scan a standard size document than a non-standard size. The scanners are designed having considering the standard paper sizes (ISO as well as US sizes). More than that, this is a main factor upon which the price of a scanner depends on. As an example a scanner that can scan A3 size documents will cost around 4-5 times of a scanner that can scan only up to A4 or legal. So my personal opinion is that it is always good to keep your documents at A4 or legal size. This also helps a lot in the handling as well as storage of documents. Having non standard size documents will make it more difficult to file, store and even copy a document.

2. The main document was an application form which had all the filled in information in one side and the applicant's signature on the other side. That was because the second side was full of all the terms and conditions under which the customer had to place the signature. Since the signature was required to capture we had to scan both sides of the page.

If the signature was on the same side along with the other details then we could have scanned only that side of the page. This would have reduced the cost of conversion by 50% , and reduced the project duration at least by 20-30%. Not only that we would have reduced the storage and bandwidth requirements by about 30%. So this is a good example why you need to consider about the layout of the documents.

These are just two examples of how the size and the layout of documents will matter in your ECM activities.

New Website Launch

Sanje Lanka Private Limited is proud to announce the launching of new website on 1st December 2009. This website will deliver details on organizations products portfolio and value added services. Some of the interesting areas of this new design includes product trials & download section, online services log-in for premium account holders, content management knowledge repository with white-papers, newsletters, case studies and best practices etc.

We would like to invite you to navigate through the pages to find correct solutions & services, get update on state of art technologies and product portfolio for enterprise content management. We hope you enjoy the new website.

Paper as the starting point of an ECM strategy?

As the name says, ECM (Enterprise Content Management) is about managing the total content of the entire organisation. As people who are working in IT, we tend to limit our focus about electronic content only; namely electronic files, scanned images, emails etc.. But what about physical documents?

I think any ECM strategy should start from considering about managing of paper documents in the organisation, since most of the content will become a paper document at some stage of it's lifecycle. The paperless office that everyone was talking about (and still talks about) may not be a reality soon. Also managing of paper documents has gained more consideration due to the increasing printing expenses and "Go-green" initiatives that take place at present.

There are lot of things that one needs to consider about physical document management. I will start with one most simple yet very important factor to consider; paper sizes.

As we all know paper documents come in different sizes and in different nature. The standardisation of measurement of paper started by a mathematician named Georg Lichtenberg, in Germany and later adopted and supported by ISO. (This is an interesting article about the history of paper sizes here )

Some interesting facts to know;

1. There is a relationship between the width and the length of a standard paper which is; Length = 1.414 * Width (1 to the square root of 2).

2. One square metre is taken as the starting point of measuring, which is called the size A0, the remaining sizes are calculated by halving the preceding size.

3. Almost all industrialised countries adopt ISO - 216 as the standard for measuring paper sizes except US and Canada. :-)

In my next post I will write about the importance of considering the paper sizes when planning an ECM strategy.

(paperonweb is a good reference site for more information regarding paper sizes as well as anything related to paper.)

DocuTeam extends its services for Knowledge Processing

With the global demand for outsourced knowledge processing services Sanje Lanka - DocuTeam diverted its knowledge processing services into XML data processing, mass scale OCR/ICR recognition, RTF based standard document preparation and document assembly services.

Sanje Lanka maintains accuracy/quality level of 99.95 for these services and currently customers include governments and enterprise companies in US, UK and India.

Electronic Agricultural Land Registry for Ministry of Agricultural Development and Agrarian Services Sri Lanka

Sanje Lanka completed building electronic agricultural land registry for Ministry of Agricultural Development and Agrarian Services Sri Lanka. Under this project Sanje Lanka has provided its services to digitize and index all the agricultural ledgers,upload into enterprise document management solution - Form-less Document Systems enabling online search, retrieval and manipulation of agricultural land related information.

Under this project nearly 20,000 land registries are available online for retrieval from district level branch office facilitating significant improvement in customer service due to speedy search modules with streaming capabilities and advanced printing workflow.

Road Map for Sanje Solutions Portfolio

Road Map for Sanje Lanka Software solutions published today - 10th November 2009 with the aim of providing state of the art document management platform for enterprises. The significant components include online cloud computing based electronic document management services, web enabled industrial document imaging tools, enhanced security, web based distributed data capture modules, integration with major application platforms such as Microsoft SharePoint Server 2007 will further strengthen the operations, quality and service levels of the customers of Sanje Lanka Private Limited.

Send an email to info@sanje.com if you are interested in receiving Sanje Solutions Road Map documentation V9.E.