10.07.06
Migrating Hard Copy Data Into Soft Copy
A few days ago, we got an e-mail by one of our blog readers. Here is the e-mail sent to us (the name were change for privacy issue):
Hi,
I’m ***, MIS Exec from Organization X. We are looking for a solution to migrate our old hard copy file to soft copy and store in CD or server. Because the old hard copy file already taken a lot of office space.
From your blog we found that a local company also needs to migrate their hardcopy to soft copy when implementing ARCHIBUS/FM system.
So we are quite interested in your solution and hope we can have more info on that. Hope to hear from you soon, thank you.
We are not so sure what kind of hard copy data they have sowe shall assume that their data is for property and facility operations. They can find other solutions if their data is for other use. Often we heard about ‘Garbage In, Garbage Out’, if crappy data is entered into the system, crappy reports will come out. The first logical thing to do when migrating a hard copy data is to:
- Verify if the data is usable or not?
- Is it viable for future use?
- Is it necessary to retain all the hard copy data?
Other ways to do this is to scan each and every hard copy documents they have and store it in a CD or a hard disk. Then index the entire scanned document and store. This what libraries are doing for archived newspapers. As for ARCHIBUS/FM system, from our experience, only few usable data can be use for the Facility Management system. Still, we need to do an analysis first before we could decide on anything.
technorati tags:facility, management, migration, data
Melanie said,
October 10, 2006 at 9:54 am
So, do you find that most companies don’t find it viable to use Raster to Vector software for that sort of thing? (such as Autodesk Raster Design, or Ideals’ Scan2CAD, or WinTopo, etc, etc) I realize they are all very time-consuming options. Do you think that most facilities would rather field verify, or just wait until a project renovates and area and use the documentation billed into that project to patchwork their files together?
Personally I’ve got every hardcopy indexed already with graphical indications of project boundaries. We have just gotten a scanner, but, so far are using only raster formats, as vector conversion just isn’t in our expertise or budget as of yet, but, I would like it to be at some point.