eBridge Solutions Blog

A matter of distribution

Though more and more documents are arriving electronically, paper is still a large part of most businesses. What are all the ways you share important paper documents with clients, employees and vendors:

• mail
• fax
• inner-office mail
• overnight services
• courier

What if there was a way to eliminate these methods and save some time and money in the process? One way businesses nationwide are changing the way they handle important hard copy documents is by turning them into digital format.

Mail is too slow. Faxes are on the way out and waste paper. Even e-faxes need to be stored. Inner-office mail is slower than traditional mail and rarely makes it to the right person, plus you need to have a mail room.

Let's dig deeper into overnight services. A typical package costs about $25 to ship next day. If you are in a business that relies on signatures, you probably use FedEx or UPS on a regular basis. A scanned copy of a signed document, however, is considered a legal copy. So, you could e-mail documents to a client, have them print and sign those documents and then scan and return to you. In minutes, not hours, days or weeks.

Or, take it a step further. Set up individual file cabinets online for each client and allow them to scan their signed documents right in for indefinite storage. 

Why is that important? Well, how much more cost-effective would it be to e-mail documents instead of overnight them? How much clearer would a scanned copy of a document be than a fax?

Who can afford couriers these days? And isn't e-mail faster than any courier you could hire?

Look at the ways you distribute new and existing paper in your office. Going digital can speed up your way of doing business, making you more profitable and successful. As an added incentive, you won't have give your courier a holiday bonus this year.

Document Management Industry of the Week: Reproductive Medicine

Reproductive medicine is very specialized. Treatments for infertile couples can range from a series of shots to full-blown surgery and can last for a few weeks or, more often than not, months and years. Some clinics have on-site laboratories. Some treat both male and female patients. So you can imagine how much paperwork the offices accumulate with treatment plans, lab results and insurance forms.

That is why reproductive medicine is our document management industry of the week.

One of our newest clients is the Reproductive Medicine Associates of New Jersey (RMANJ). They began using eBridge Solutions' web-based document management system to store their patient charts.

Initially, RMANJ’s staff was apprehensive about the extra time it would take them to scan in new documents and get a handle of how eBridge works. That apprehension was short-lived, however, when they discovered how quick and easy the chart scanning and retrieving process was.

RMANJ's physicians were also skeptical about the transition from paper to electronic records. The team at RMANJ did something very smart and for a patient's first consultation,the staff provides the doctor with a full paper chart. After the consult, the paper is scanned into eBridge and the chart goes paperless — giving everyone time to adjust to the new technology.

RMANJ was able to setup specific scanning stations throughout the office so that the scanners are easily accessible to anyone.

"In setting up eBridge, it was important that we first knew what the process would be: who was going to scan? how could we keep people at their desks?" said Brooke Bonser, RMANJ,Database Systems Support and Analyst Specialist said. "The scanning stations give access to anyone who needs to scan and have proven to be very efficient."

RMANJ has been using eBridge Solutions for about a year now. They haven't started to scan any records housed in their off-site storage facility yet, but have been using eBridge to scan in new and current patient paperwork and have recently started scanning HR and administrative files.

You'll labor less by adding document management

As the office empties, I thought I'd write my blog in celebration of the upcoming holiday: Labor Day. 

Labor Day is a holiday celebrated in the United States and Canada on the first Monday in September to honor the laborer. It was inaugurated by the Knights of Labor in 1882 and made a national holiday by the U.S. Congress in 1894.

Honoring the laborers of the world is admirable. Giving us a day off (hopefully with pay) is even better. But, if you want to make every day a little less laborious for your employees, consider taking something away: paper.

One of the biggest frustrations workers face is dealing with paper.

It gets thrown away. It gets coffee spilled on it. It's on Joe's desk when Susie needs it.

To share paper, you have to fax it, mail it or courier it. Auditors have to come to the office to review it. It's just cumbersome.

So, this Labor Day, give your employees a gift that will keep giving: document management. With document management systems (particularly those that are web-based), your staff will be able to work more efficiently with less effort, because:

• documents can be found via index value or keyword searches
• they don't need to leave their desks to find files
• they can work remotely - when traveling or at home
• they can share documents with a few mouse clicks
• more than one person can view a document simultaneously

Since it is labor-themed, Labor Day is the perfect time to think about adding document management to your office operations. Give your employees something that will last long after the fireworks, BBQ sauce and picnic baskets are gone.

P.S. As an added bonus, if you need to actually work this weekend, you won't have to get out of your swimsuit.

More than half of businesses DON'T have a formal data retention plan

More than half of businesses do not have a formal data retention plan, creating massive recovery problems due to the over-retention of information, according to a new report by Symantec.

The study, entitled 2010 Information Management Health Check Survey, reveals some shocking figures. Only 46 percent of the 1,680 global businesses asked had a data retention plan in place, meaning that most businesses lack formal procedures for addressing the storage of data and when, if ever, it gets deleted.

87 percent believed such a plan should allow them to delete unnecessary information, but 13 percent would rather not delete anything, even useless material, at all.

The research also found that 75 percent of backups have infinite retention or are on “legal hold”, meaning that they can potentially never be deleted, creating a nightmare situation for those trying to sort through backups to restore a system to a usable state or to regain specific lost information. 

The study found that one in six companies archive information indefinitely. It also found that 25 percent of data that is backed up is not needed and should not be retained, since it hogs space and makes accessing essential information more difficult.

The report discovered that there was widespread improper legal hold practices, with 70 percent of companies performing legal holds using backups, 25 percent preserving an entire backup set for legal holds on files and documents, and 45 percent of backup storage being used for these legal holdings.

If that were not enough, it also found improper backup, recovery and archive practices were rampant. 51 percent prohibit end-user archives, but 65 percent report that end-users archive material anyway when not permitted. 49 percent use backup software for archiving, even when it's not designed for that purpose.

The consequences of these improper practices are manifold, including high storage costs, long backup windows, excessive recovery times, increased litigation risk and inefficient electronic discovery, none of which a business can dismiss lightly.

Reposted from Techeye.net on August 5, 2010

Turning Regulatory Compliance Into A Business Advantage

No one wants to hear from their boss, CPA or attorney that they need to adhere to industry, state or even federal regulations or risk penalties. It's more red tape. More aggravation. And, let's face it, more work.

But, there are times when making an investment to tighten up your compliance gaps can actually improve the overall efficiency of your business. Especially when it comes to managing your records.

A document management and retention policy that follows best practices in your industry and meets regulatory requirements (HIPAA, SOX, GLB, The Patriot Act and more) has many benefits that translate beyond just compliance, including:

• Avoiding legal landmines. If you are ever called to court, having copies (date and time stamped, even) of important records could be enough to keep you from paying big fines or - worst-case scenario - going to jail.
• Improving customer service. Access to electronic documents, enables you and your staff can quickly and easily answer customer questions. No more digging for files or copies of invoices.
• Increasing employee morale. Not having to dig for files will make your employees MUCH happier. So will clean desks and being able to work from home occasionally.
• Lowering overall cost of doing business. By converting paper documents to digital files as part of your record retention strategy, you'll be able to reduce the need for paper, toner and other office supplies. You can also cut back on postage, couriers and overnight delivery services and reduce or eliminate on and off-site storage.
• Reducing security risk. Digital documents can be password protected and encrypted. It's much harder for files to end up in the dumpster behind your office if they aren't in paper format.
• Creating a disaster-recovery backup. Digital documents stored in the cloud can be accessed any time, anywhere. So, if your office burns to the ground or is inaccessible for a period of time, you can still conduct business. Not so if your file cabinets are six feet under water.
• Reducing need for in-house IT, servers and support. If your digital documents are entrusted to a professional hosted document management provider, you simplify the work for your IT staff, and eliminate the expense of servers or technical support. Someone else will do that for you.

By going paperless, you'll be meeting more of your regulatory requirements AND you'll realize some additional benefits that will make your business run more efficiently and cost-effectively. In this economy, being more nimble and streamlined could be the business advantage you need to be more successful than your competition.

Document Management Industry Of The Week: Death Care

Benjamin Franklin said it best: In this world nothing is certain but death and taxes. Could that be why CPAs and yes, funeral directors, are busy year round? Could it also be why they accumulate so much paper?

We love accountants, but this week's industry of the week is the death care industry, which encompasses funeral homes, cemeteries, pet cemeteries, crematories and the vendors that serve them. We've been to quite a few death care trade shows in the past year and you couldn't find a nicer, more professional group of people anywhere.

That's why it's rewarding to provide a service that can actually help THEM: our web-based document management.

Funeral homes, for example, have pre-need (funeral plans made in advance) documents as well as at-need (upon death) paperwork to manage. In most states, the record retention requirements for at-need documents are seven years after death. If someone makes plans when they are 45 and the average age of death is 80, you do the math.

Also, many funeral homes have more than one location. So centralizing records is a time and money saving proposition. The hours a funeral home operates -- truly 24 hours a day, 365 days a week -- also makes document management beneficial, since files can be pulled up on any computer with an Internet connection -- even at home while the funeral director is on call.

“With eBridge Solutions, documents on 'active', 'old', or 'pre-need' files will be at the fingertips of our staff… no matter where they are located… or what hour of day or night.” Bill McQueen,
Anderson-McQueen Funeral Homes

Cemeteries, on the other hand, have it even tougher for a few reasons:

1. They need to keep their burial records FOREVER. Think about it, if there is a cemetery, you're always going to need to know who is buried where.
2. Those cemetery maps and images may be oversized and difficult to store in paper format.
3. Some cemeteries in the United States are 200 years old and they have records dating back as far. Seriously. Some records are so old, they can't even scan them. Those burial record books are actually photographed page by page so the paper doesn't disintegrate.

That's why the death care industry is our Document Management Industry of the Week.

Five years after Hurricane Katrina, is your business more secure?

Hurricane Katrina made landfall as a Category 3 storm on the morning of Monday, August 29, 2005 in southeast Louisiana. It caused severe destruction along the Gulf coast from central Florida to Texas, much of it due to the storm surge.

Eventually 80% of the city and large tracts of New Orleans became flooded, and the floodwaters lingered for weeks. However, the worst property damage occurred in coastal areas, such as all Mississippi beach-front towns, which were flooded as boats and casino barges rammed buildings, pushing cars and houses inland, with waters reaching as far as 12 miles from the beach. This damage forced a long-term evacuation of a significant portion of the population and labor force.

Hurricane Katrina inflicted incalculable billions in damage, altered millions of lives and destroyed thousands of small companies.

One of its biggest blows may have been to an old-fashioned way of doing business-on perishable, irreplaceable paper records that are easily destroyed by water and scattered by wind. The storm left many evacuees without drivers’ licenses, wills, credit cards or health care records. Without these paper records, storm victims faced fundamental challenges getting back on their feet in the 21st century economy.

Makeup and wardrobe consultant, Adrienne Moncrief Hemphill ran a small but thriving custom-label makeup business out of her Bay St. Louis, Mississippi home that was demolished by Hurricane Katrina. Essentially her most valuable possession was her mailing list of her some 500 customers she kept on her computer.

She lost everything in the storm, her catalogs, her Web site, her inventory of products and most disastrous of all, her mailing list. She was able to relocate to Jackson, Mississippi where she faced the prospect of essentially starting her business over again from scratch.

“I sat down with a woman who worked with me and we tried to recreate my customer list from memory,” she relates. “Eventually we were able to remember about 150 of the 500 customers I had and eventually about 200 more found me.”

But she admits, it has not been easy. But she has learned a valuable lesson. Today all the data on her computer is backed up at a remote location.

Scarier still, there were 3,000 criminal cases in progress in New Orleans alone when Katrina struck, but the District Attorney was forced to suspend many of those prosecutions because tangible evidence, including police reports, interview transcripts, fingerprints and DNA samples are lost.

In response to the disaster, New Orleans officials and the federal government started to beat the digital drum. They want companies to move from paper-based records to computerized records that can be stored off site, backed up cheaply and moved easily out of harm’s way.

Have you taken that step in your business? How long would it take you to get back to work if you were unable to access your office for four weeks? Would you be able to? Could document management make a difference?

Moving from paper to digital records is more than just a good idea – it can be a lifesaver. Ask any small business owner in New Orleans.

Another sign of the paperless office?

If Paul Curlander, chief executive officer of Lexmark International Inc., one of the largest printer manufacturers has anything to do with it, his employees will start helping big companies print less, Bloomberg Businessweek reports in its Aug. 30 issue. They are actually working with customers to reduce the number of printers, scanners and fax machines they have in their offices, which is great! For every 16.5 reams of copy paper or 8,333.3 sheets businesses don't use, a tree is spared.

Is this a sign that the paperless office is almost a reality? Or, a clear indication the business world realizes paper-based records require more money and time to maintain, are more prone to disaster and are far less secure than digital documents?

Curlander goes on to say, “It used to be that all business documents were paper. Now they’re digital, and you need software to manage it.”

Well, maybe not ALL documents are digital. But, enough are that document management systems make sense as a central repository to store both scanned images and electronic records. People are printing e-mails and attachments right into their document management systems, eliminating the need for printers altogether.

Electronic documents stored online are much cheaper to maintain than file cabinets and file rooms. How much do you pay in rent per square foot? What else could you do with your file room or file cabinet space?

Online file storage also puts information in front of you QUICKLY. Using index values or keyword searches, you can easily find just the document you need using any computer with Internet access.

Paper files can get wet, burn up or stolen. It's much harder for that to happen to files stored in the cloud. Digital documents are easier to back up - especially when someone else is doing it for you!

Lastly, if you are dealing with paper files, I have a secret: they are not secure. I've heard horror stories from clients who've had HR files rifled through by disgruntled employees. We've all heard stories about financial firms or medical clinics that have ended up with confidential documents in their dumpster - intentionally or not. By moving documents from paper to digital (and then PROPERLY disposing of the originals), you can be confident that you won't end up on the evening news.

So you bought a document scanner. Now what?

The path toward a paperless office is a noble quest and typically begins with the purchase of a scanner. But, while a scanner will help you eliminate some of the paper in your office, it won't get your documents better organized, more secure or more compliant.

Yes, a scanner can help you convert your old paper files into an electronic format. Then what? What do you name the files? Where do you store them? How do you protect them?

File naming.If you're like most people, you try to name your files to make them easier to find. So, if you are saving a sales contract for Jones Manufacturing, you might name the file JonesManufacturingContract.pdf. or 2010 JonesMfgContract.pdf. That's about two pieces of information - who and what.

With a document management system, not only would you be able to identify the customer name and document type, but you could add the project manager assigned to the client, the date the contract was signed (or is up for renewal) and version number, if any. You can sort by those values as well.

File storage. After you've scanned your paper, you have a few options for digital file storage.

• Hard Drive
• Tape
• CD
• In-House Server
• Cloud-Based Virtual Drive 

While all of these are options, none offer the protection you'll find by scanning and storing your files with an online document management system. Hard drives and servers crash. CDs and tapes can malfunction. Some cloud-based drives are little more than a pretty web site. And, more importantly, you or your IT staff need to spend time each day/week/month/year backing all of the files up. This makes scanning and storing files in your office time-consuming... and a little dangerous.

File compliancy. Depending on the industry you are in, storing your documents unprotected and unencrypted on your hard drive might mean you're not complying with certain regulations. HIPAA, for example, requires that patient information be stored in an encrypted state at rest and during transmission to and from your office. The Red Flags Rule also requires that sensitive information be stored securely in electronic formats to prevent violations. Do your PDFs meet those requirements? Are you sure?

A scanner, like a treadmill, is a great piece of machinery. But, like the treadmill, if you don't have a trainer and a goal, your scanner will probably end up in the corner of the office. But, under a pile of paper instead of a pile of clothes.

eBridge Solutions jumps 500 places on Inc. 5000 list

Inc. Magazine ranked Tampa-based eBridge Solutions number 2093 on its annual Inc. 500/5000, an exclusive ranking of the United State’s 5,000 fastest-growing, privately-owned companies. Last year, eBridge ranked 2594.

"We are pleased with our continued growth and are ecstatic to be included on Inc’s prestigious list once again,” said Leslie Haywood, eBridge Solutions’ CEO. “Our intentions are to continue building our online document management subscription base while providing exceptional customer service to our clients and work-life balance for our employees. We wouldn’t be the company we are today without their faith.”

The 2010 Inc. 500|5000 is ranked according to percentage revenue growth from 2006 through 2009. To qualify, companies must have been founded and generating revenue by June 30, 2006. Additionally, they had to be based in the United States, privately held, for profit, and independent—not subsidiaries or divisions of other companies—as of December 31, 2009. (Since then, a number of companies on the list have gone public or been acquired.)

The minimum revenue required for 2006 is $80,000; the minimum for 2009 is $2 million. Revenue figures given in the company profiles are for calendar year 2009, as are employee counts. Complete results of the Inc. 500/5000, including company profiles and an interactive database that can be sorted by industry, region, and other criteria, can be found on Inc.com.