Compare the Features of the iKAN Virtual Document center to these alternatives:

1. Maintaining a Manual Based Filing System

2. Installing a Traditional Packaged Document Management Solution

3. Continuing to Use Electronic Filing System that is Not Meeting Your Needs

1. Your Current Manual Based Paper Filing System

Can I continue to get by just with my paper based filing system?

If you are running your business storing your paper documents in file cabinets and storage boxes you are:

• Vulnerable to loss from natural disaster
• Vulnerable to fines or penalties for non-compliance
• Wasting time looking for paper files
• Having to recreate lost or misfiled documents
• Spending a lot of money on mailing, faxing, and copying
• Not as organized or efficient as your competitor
• All of the above

Let’s face it, with the capabilities available in todays electronic and Internet driven world, moving paper documents around is not the best use of your time or money.

Does your company have a disaster prevention plan in place that is actively managed?

In a survey by Fujitsu Corporation, 55% of persons asked said their organization had no formal disaster recovery plans for their paper documents. This can be a huge problem. The issue also ties into compliance – if paper files are lost in a disaster, the underlying compliance required for those documents is also gone, which could spell more trouble.

Have you considered the security of your present paper based filing system?

Fact is, most security breaches happen from within organizations, not from the outside. Storing documents within your own network on your own servers is definitely not foolproof. Are your confidential documents safe from employee access? What is the extra cost to the organization to create secure filing areas (such as locked file cabinets or locked entrances to paper file repositories? Is your present filing system an open area where nobody knows who has a file out at any given time?

Is managing your company documents one of your core competencies?

For some organizations, it is. They have the staff and the resources required to manage both the IT infrastructure (servers, databases, help desk and training), and the records management professionals to track everything. But for most companies, they want to focus their resources on their core competencies, and dedicate their resources to that end. It’s one of the reasons the iKAN Virtual Document Center makes perfect sense – your documents are scanned and preserved and available when you need them, and you pay for what you use.

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2. A Traditional Packaged Document Management Solution

Have you considered the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) of a packaged solution, including setup, maintenance, training, backup, and upgrades?

According to the Software & Information Industry Association (SIIA), planners often omit or underestimate the people resources and other costs necessary to acquire and run an on-premise software solution. On average, the cost of the software represents only 20% of the total cost to acquire, setup, train, and maintain a new software system.

Have you planned for the on-going costs through the life of your system? Let’s start with on-going maintenance. Most vendors charge as much as 20% per year of the software cost for on-going maintenance. This usually results in an annual software upgrade. Who will be performing the upgrade? Will it have an impact on operations? What is the cost in man hours and user training to perform the upgrade?

What will you do when the computer that your documents are stored on needs to be repaired, upgraded, or replaced? This is an often overlooked issue. Most people don’t back up their personal systems at home and rely on their organization to back up their PC’s at work. The time and effort required to reestablish a software system on a new system can be consuming and tedious. If the local machine crashes, the data is often incomplete when a restore is performed. Many companies purchase or lease PC’s on a 3 year cycle. With the rate of improvement in performance and lowering of hardware costs, turnover is often higher.

Many people are coming to the conclusion that it’s just not worth the time and effort involved to upgrade and update application software in these shorter cycles.

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3. Your Current Electronic Filing System is Not Meeting Your Needs

This is a common situation, and could be due to a number of different reasons. The biggest underlying reason is that the application is not sized for the task at hand. Some of the common symptoms:

1. The solution cannot scale. The individual desktop solution or the same solution is licensed on individual desktops without a common repository. Are different users running different versions of the same application? Does everyone maintain their own islands of information?

2. The system is expensive to expand. Too often, deployments are limited to a small few or a single department, because the expansion costs prove to be too high. Did your project start with great intentions only to stop progressing because the costs became too high?

3. There is no underlying database application. Many applications that support scanned and electronic documents are driven by a file name, which the user applies after navigating to a folder where they want to store the document. Have you spent unnecessary time trying to find a file you know you scanned but just can’t find? Have you ever gotten the wrong version of a file thinking you were looking at the right one? Have you ever felt that you’ve spent more time looking for a file than if you had never converted it in the first place?

4. The system is outdated. Is technical support getting more difficult to get? Do you experience periods of days where the system is down waiting for someone to fix it? Products reach the end of their life cycle, and technical support can get difficult to obtain on a reliable basis. Methods and techniques become obsolete.

5. The system lacks effective security controls. Do your users avoid storing documents on shared drives because they fear it could be a security hazard?

6. The system is difficult to understand and use. With the amount of specific information we have to keep track of today, who has time to learn proprietary formats and systems, especially if you are a casual user? Have you ever learned a system, not used it for some time, then had trouble remembering how it works when you went back? Did the manual for operating the system resemble space shuttle flight operations guide?

If you’re ready for a change to something new – one that’s easy to learn, easy to acquire, setup and use, then contact us today. Let us show you how easy and affordable our solution really is!

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