The Challenge

Given the company's business model – with numerous employees working at client locations and a distributed management profile – the HR division estimated that it had a great opportunity to leverage document imaging technology to achieve a variety of important goals. These included lowering costs and improving the company's ability to meet industry compliance and audit regulations. Additionally, the company wanted to enhance the security of its employee data spanning operations in the U.S., Canada and the Philippines as well as to support sustain ability initiatives by reducing paper usage. The latter included the goal of creating a more efficient, paperless system to "onboard" new hires and store their personal and work-related information.

An important challenge was to improve timely access to documents. When HR professionals at headquarters needed to retrieve a document pertaining to an employee at one of the company's many regional offices, a staffer at that regional office was forced to go through files, find the target document, and scan or ship it. Since most employees at these regional offices are dedicated to maintaining on-site client service, often no one was standing by to handle clerical requests. Thus, the simple act of retrieving a document could end up taking a day or more. And in many cases, a single employee's records were scattered around multiple office locations, especially if the employee had relocated during his employment.

Auditing was another problem. If, for example, the HR organization needed to produce copies of every employee's I-9 immigration status form, the process could take days or weeks of manual labor by trained specialists. Cases like these can challenge even the best organized companies.

Fire, flood and natural decay were yet another concern around the paper-based records. In addition to causing operations problems, these forces put the company at risk since some documents are legally required to be retained for decades. Many companies have no plan whatsoever for disaster and decay.

The Solution

Océ's records management team addressed privacy concerns for the HR organization through Océ's secure national imaging center near Salt Lake City, Utah, which offers high-volume offsite digital imaging management capabilities to clients throughout the country. Documents arrived at the facility in carefully packed boxes secured by tamper evident tape. In a process called match and merge, file folders have numeric codes that only later, after they're scanned in, link to critical confidential information, e.g., social security numbers, in the company's HR information system.

This means that project personnel scanning documents didn't have access to sensitive information about an employee. They would simply key in the employee code and then scan. This layer of security and confidentiality was very important to the company.

Every box of documents contained a manifest indicating what records should have arrived to the imaging center and when. The company's HR managers could track these shipments using software provided by Océ and the shipper. Specific processes were in place for re-packaging and returning documents after scanning. Scanning workers were not allowed to remove any paper from the scanning room for any reason.

The Result

In eight months, Océ digitized records for 12,000 current and past HR employees dating back to 2007. At an average of 40 documents per employee, this totals close to 500,000 images. The imaging initiative yielded a host of financial and performance benefits. First, projected savings for the imaging and onboarding projects will be approximately $200,000 over the next five years. Second, the HR records became digital records, rendering the original paper documents "copies" that can be destroyed as dictated by the company's records retention schedule and policy. The physical location of a personnel record is now irrelevant. A record is simply in the repository, and any authorized HR employee with a Web browser can retrieve any document at any time.

In addition to efficiency, the new system enhances the value of the company's recent investment in electronic on-boarding software. New employees' documents are now stored in the organization's HR records repository rather than as electronic islands in a sea of paper.