When you are on the move -

I travelled to Delhi last week. Before I took my flight, I was already feeling early symptoms of fever, but wrote it off as common cold.

However, the day after I reached Delhi, I was down with temperature. The following day, I visited a Doctor. Being, my first visit, he took 15-20 mins just to understand my history, my allergies, and more since sinusitis has been troubling me since a while.

Considering the prevalence of malaria and dengue nowadays, the doctor asked me to do a CBC and some other tests. I had got these tests done just 2 days before for my insurance - Obviously, I had not expected the illness and hence was not carrying my reports. I didn't even recall the results. So another round of tests was unavoidable.

One may concur, if you have fever, even if you sitting for as little a 15-20 mins,,, you body starts paining. I was at the clinic for around an hour, first the waiting , and then the consulting.

Fortunately, my tests were negative (the results only came out in the evening, so I had to visit the doctor a second time), and doctor suggested it was just a viral.

The point here is - a lot of time got consumed here just to get to the diagnosis, which would reduce substantially if I would be carrying my medical history and my reports. Obviously it’s not practical to carry your medical file everywhere you travel, but certainly if it is available on a chip, or a cd or even on web - it should be greatly helpful.

Paper Records Management...is outsourcing a solution to end the woes?

Paper records are generated by all businesses. Be it the part of the processes, like forms for telecom companies, banks, financial institutions, etc or the mandatory papers such as financial, tax papers, vouchers, ledgers etc., and papers just keep on piling, I just don’t want to be in a situation where I have to fear the loss of my important documents.

Only if I had an alternative arrangement, I would have freed up my costly real estate space and utilised for more meaningful purpose rather than using it for dead storage.

What a mess these papers create, once the record keeping goes even a little out of sync.

Oh I literally waste my personnel in just maintain my records!!!

These questions must be bugging many a businesses, especially where the real estate and man-power cost are spiralling up.

Wouldn’t it be fantastic if we had an option of outsourcing these non-core works?

Physical Storage of documents at distant place by a specialised firm is just the right answer.

Just imagine for an educational institute, it may free up space for additional classrooms or labs, for a hospital it might free up space for additional beds, or equipments.

If I need to summarize the need for Physical Storage of Documents at Distant Place, I would put it as

1. Tedious process of management, storage and retrieval of the paper-based documents
2. File and document storage issues and related cost of realty
3. Paper Document handling issues
4. Paper transportation costs while routing/ sending/ distributing the documents to various personnel across the group
5. Rising Printing, Faxing, Photocopying, mailing and courier (distribution) costs
6. Tedious Audit Process and rising audit cost
7. Tedious process in linking of the various documents
8. Tedious process of tracking files and documents and related comments/ annotations

And what benefits do I derive from it? Well to put it in simple words would be.

1. Savings in realty cost for Storage of documents
2. Minimized turn-around time for key organizational processes
3. Organized Documentation and hence faster document search resulting in savings in time and increase in productivity
4. Safety against Natural disasters and loss of Paper documents
5. Sharing of Documents online, thereby reducing the distribution costs.
6. Savings in Manpower cost for manpower related to storage and management of documents
7. Facilitates security and integrity of documents, hence minimizing chances of fraud and illegal activities.
8. Overall improvement in Enterprise productivity and management of corporate knowledge