>>By the time you do all the things that you need to do to properly
prep, capture and index the documents, you're looking at a page cost
that could be US$.40 to $1.00 per page (yes, in certain instances, with
single page documents that have barcodes for self-indexing and require
no prep, you can get it done, all in, for under US$.10 per page). 

I have only limited experience with the cost of doing business in cities
like Chicago.  And the costs used here are representative of what I
remember.  On the other hand, we commonly have typical business
documents prepared, imaged, indexed, QC'd, and exported in a format
ready to load into our system for $0.10 to $.20 per page. Internally we
scan to film on a daily basis for as low as $.05 per page, including
prep and indexing.

Several years ago a company I worked with did a very large litigation
support project using imaging and OCR technology.  Our quoted rate from
a company specializing in Litigation Support was in the neighbor hood of
$1.20 a page.  And that was for deliver of images and indexes only.  We
did the project ourselves for under $.040 a page, including purchase of
hardware, software, leasing buildings training some 250 temporary
employees.  They scanned, indexed, and stored several million pages of
the most pertinent engineering, operations, maintenance and office
records.

I do agree that scanning as a replacement for cold storage of records is
a poor business decision.  Unless there is a compelling reason for the
images, don't bother.  The last calculations I did locally found that
the break even point was somewhere around 25 years.  And that didn't
account for system maintenance or required migrations of images.

My point is this.  There are lots of variables in the cost of imaging,
including, indexing required, image processing, equipment, location and
competition.  If you are looking at either getting into the imaging
business or using it in your organization, you need to spend some time
doing homework from your local area.  If you use my figures and live in
Detroit, you are going to break the bank.  If you use the ones from
Chicago and live in Sidney, NE, you may be leaving a very good business
proposition on the table.

Bill R

Bill Roach, CRM
Enterprise EDMS Coordinator
State of North Dakota
ITD/Records Management
701-328-3589

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