Companies that want to go paperless begin scanning the contents of their existing filing cabinets into a document management system. They will begin scanning drawer after drawer of their cabinets and find file misfiled or thought to be lost.

Filing cabinets are simple systems with no brain. You’re provided a drawer and a key and the rest of the work is left up to us. There’s no advice on where to put documents, we’re not told exactly where certain documents can be found, documents aren’t automatically routed to the right people in workflow, and our key certainly can’t be taken away to stop our access to the files.

Filing cabinets have gained the reputation as the office “Black Hole” of lost documents. Over multiple years, with multiple people assigned to file information into these cabinets, misplace and do not return documents to the filing cabinets. As people organize to their own standards and methods, documents are inevitably filed in the wrong places and the next time a file is needed, it can’t be found.

One of the ways a document management system can resolve the problems of lost files is through the use of OCR technology. An OCR system can capture text and make it searchable on the computer and lost documents can be searched and found in a matter of seconds. By being able to search for a document by vendor or related subject matter, files never remain lost for long.