How might I go about selecting an outside scanning service?

If you decide that you'd like an outside document scanning service to digitize your documents, you may want to meet with and interview several vendors in order to determine which one is the right fit for your company.

Some steps you may want take with each vendor are:

Conduct a demo scan

Ask your prospective vendor(s) to provide a demo/sample of your own documents prior to commencing work so that you know what quality to expect and to ensure that the vendor knows how much work is involved in your project and won't have a good argument for changing the quoted price after scanning has begun.

Understand how pricing works

Be sure you know whether each quote you receive is a comprehensive per-image quote or whether document preparation, indexing, quality control, etc. will be billed separately. Also find out if any minimums apply.

Get quality assurances

Determine whether or not human quality control (QC) will be performed on your job, and find out if QC will be done using a sampling process or if each page will be individually checked.

Ask for references, and follow up to find out if they check out.

Find out if your vendor offers a quality guarantee on their final product and how long you have to identify any quality problems.

Consider your vendor's facilities and staff.

Find out if your documents will stay local, or if they will they be shipped out of the state/country for scanning and indexing. If they will stay local then visit their facilities and look for things like alarm systems and video monitoring.

If your documents contain any sensitive information, make sure your vendor's employees sign confidentiality agreements and are required to undergo background checks.