A medium-sized company has started using the digital archive. Its business mainly consisted of admission/issue of goods, which required a lot of paperwork. Increased business activity exposed weaknesses.

Searching for paper documents took too much time for the users. Often, they are misplaced or even lost. The paper archive increased and it became very non-transparent. Because it was only available on different location, users often made internal copies or even created their own archives. Due to insufficient air-conditioning in the storehouse, older records were hard to read.

Because the storage costs increased, the management has decided to introduce digital archive. They have decided for a combination of external scanning and private sources. They scan important paper documents on their own and place them in the box of current week, which is sent to external contractors for scanning. To ensure security, all scanned documents are archived in their private digital archive in the company.

According to the company’s organisational structure, all content is transparently arranged in the classification scheme. To make the content available for the entire duration of their storage, all captured documents are converted to formats, which are suitable for long-term archiving (PDF/A, TIFF).

Only users with appropriate rights can access the content and metadata.
They can only access the content with the same or lower security class. Because of the possibility to search the content by metadata or full text, the work is done faster. All views and changes of the content or metadata are tracked in the digital archive. Authenticity and integrity are ensured.

Later on, the company also decided to link the digital archive with the information system. All sent documents are automatically archived to appropriate locations in the classification scheme. Received documents that are individually or massively captured in the digital archive are placed in the classification scheme and are connected to the appropriate application entries. The application user can therefore access the electronic documents directly from the application.