The Benefits of Professional Document Scanning Services

When you have a lot of paper files piling up, you could use some help. Digitizing that stack can save you a lot of time and money. In this guide, we’ll explain the benefits of a professional document scanning service.

What Is a Document Scanning Service?

A document scanning service is an outside company that takes your physical papers, puts them through a large-format scanner, then digitizes everything. You’re left with PDFs or image files located on your server, in your inbox, or on an external hard drive.

The scanned documents can vary a lot. They could be large hand-drawn engineering drawings, invoices from customers, or drawings for vendor components that you use in your designs.

The document scanning service would take your boxes of papers, scan all of them, and deliver you usable files. They should sign an NDA before to keep your information safe.

The Benefits of Professional Document Scanning Services

When you bring in a professional document scanning service, you have a lot to gain. This is especially true for engineering companies that have a mixture of hand drawings, legacy drawings, and customer information.

Keep Your Drawings Safe

When you have hand-drawn engineering drawings on sheets of paper or Mylar, there’s a lot of risk. All it takes is a leaky pipe overhead, and your inventory of drawings can become obsolete. We’ve had clients lose drawings due to water, fire, theft, or simply misplacing the drawing.

When the drawings are digitized, you don’t have to worry about any of these problems. If you host all the drawings on your server and have an offline backup, then there’s no risk of losing information.

Create 3D CAD Models

It’s very hard to make 3D CAD models without digitizing your documents first. When you digitize them, you can pull up the file on your computer and use it as a guide to create the 3D model from scratch.

If you try to do the same with a physical drawing, your desk will be cluttered, and it will be hard to do the conversion.

Organize and File Your Drawings

We’ve been in a lot of backrooms that were filled with piles of hand drawings. We’ve talked to people who said that they can spend hours looking for a single drawing in the massive, unorganized pile.

After a scanning service digitizes all of your drawings, you don’t have to worry about that. You can organize your drawings based on any criteria that you’d like.
Even better, you can file the drawings into folders so similar drawings are always near each other.

Find Your Drawings Easier

How much time do you waste searching for the right drawing? Even if you know the drawing number or document number, it could take forever to find the physical drawing.

If the drawings are saved on your server and named appropriately, you can find them in seconds. It just takes a single search, and the digital file will pop up. After we scan all of your files, you can save time finding every drawing in the future.

Quickly Get Manufacturing Quotes

Modern machine shops like to work with CAD files or a PDF at the very least. We know a lot of shops that don’t even deal with pictures of hand-drawn engineering drawings because they can be inaccurate and tough to read.

After we digitize your drawing library, you can quickly get quotes to get your parts manufactured. If you can get faster quotes, it also means that you can get the parts made and delivered even sooner.

Save You Time Scanning Yourself

Some people decide to do in-house scanning to digitize their drawing inventory. This is definitely an option, but it can waste a ton of time. You’ll have to deal with the headaches of handling all the drawings, scanning them, filing them afterwards, and hoping that you didn’t miss any steps.

When you outsource the work, things get a lot easier. When our professional document scanning team takes care of it, we’ll finish it faster and get the documents back to you in no time.

How? We have industrial-grade large-format scanners and a team of archiving specialists who know what they’re doing.

Allows You to Focus on Your Business, Not Files

Another reason to outsource this project? It takes up too much of your focus. Instead of dealing with the files, you can focus on growing your business and developing new products.

Plus, there’s a learning curve when it comes to scanning documents. If the scanner isn’t calibrated or set up correctly, you could waste a lot of time.

In addition, the drawings need to be loaded a certain way to ensure they don’t tear or get marred. Allow us to handle the stress of digitizing your drawing library so you can deal with more important things.

Keep Your Invoices Together

A lot of our customers have invoices that are tied to drawings and order slips. When we professionally scan your documents, we can link all of these documents together. If you’d like, we can make a folder for each order number and put the appropriate documents into it.

When you look up the invoice in the future, you can quickly find all the important information that pertains to it. Doing this on your own would take even longer.

Save Time on Each Project

The bottom line? Our professional document scanning service is here to save you time. We save you time on the initial scan, through the organization process, and every time you’re looking for a drawing in the future.

It’s hard to quantify how much time this will save you, but it equates to a time saving every time you look for a drawing.
In a business where time is money, this is critical.

Conclusion

Bringing in a professional document scanning service can save you time, money, and help you to avoid headaches. Our team at CAD/CAM Services has been doing this for decades, and we would be happy to help with your project.

We will digitize all of your drawings, order slips, and even purchase orders. Whether you have 10 files or 10,000 files, we’re here to help. Reach out to get a free quote today.