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Digitizing mountains of paper
Published October 17, 2011 by Benedict Dabrowski
This case study, condensed from Kodak’s website, shows an effective digitization project that helps a property management company take better management of their documents. On the scale of 8,500 documents (most of which are a couple of hundred pages long), this is a big task that requires precision, speed, and above all, simplicity. The firm will begin with rental documents and continue with property agreements and even incoming mail.
Haus & Grund Kiel has more than 135 years of experience in house, apartment and property ownership. It started with a property association for Kiel and the surrounding area beginning
in 1873, which in 1932 created its own department for the management of its members’ real estate property.
Today, about 50 employees manage 9000 apartments. In the context of a restructuring of the tasks, it became necessary some time ago for the employees of several departments at different sites to be
able to simultaneously access a rental or property agreement – a task that could not be accomplished using the usual hanging file folders.
The question was how can one transfer thousands of old documents, efficiently and costeffectively, to a new system?
Extremely poor originals – extremely well processed
The personnel at Kodak rose to the challenge. The i4000 demo model proved faster than all its competitors, and better at adapting to different documents and providing higher quality final results.
In just four months, a total of 8500 rental documents have been digitised by Haus & Grund. This was made possible in particular by six apprentices and without them it would not have been possible to carry out such extensive document conversion in so short a time.
The ease of use of the i4200 helped them achieve this. The apprentices were quickly able to perform the operations, without any training. To reduce the load on the apprentices, the company also employed temporary students who prepared the documents. Today, the apprentices take turns
scanning the documents every day.
OCR and indexing with the Kodak Capture Pro software
After scanning, the integrated KODAK Capture Pro starts optical character recognition (OCR). This will later allow full-text searching across the archive. The latest version of Capture Pro is compatible with Microsoft Windows 7 and features improved OCR capability, as well as automatic importing and indexing of images from other sources.
Capture Pro contains a template in which the temporary scanning employees enter the number of the renter or property of each document as an index for sorting by keyword. This number then becomes part of the file name of the pdf document generated by Capture Pro, and is transferred to the ELO system for further processing and archiving.
After the digitisation, the old documents are first stored temporarily in cardboard boxes. The scanning team used an Excel list to record what had already been scanned, and what documents are in what boxes, in case something needs to be rescanned.
In the medium term, Haus & Grund will then have the paper documents shredded.
Going forward
Once all the 8500 rental documents have been scanned, the Kodak scanner will be used to
digitize property documents, of which there are a good 40,000, and then also to gradually handle all incoming mail. Newly received documents are naturally scanned immediately. If the associated file does not yet exist in electronic form, a new digital file is created, and filled with the current correspondence before the old documents are added at a later time.