The Market Monitor Minding the Nation's Business
Traditional organizational archives today are slowly becoming extinct. Gone are the dusty, dim-lit storage rooms, floor to ceiling shelves full of paper and stacks of cardboard boxes bursting with files and folders. Enterprises are learning to effectively manage the growing mass of documents they generate and use modern scanning technology to digitally archive vital documents fast and efficiently.
The Department of Environment and Natural Resources – Environment Management Bureau (DENR-EMB) office in San Fernando, Pampanga, has embraced the benefits of going digital in order to improve productivity.
The records section of DENR-EMB’s San Fernando office receives and safekeeps all applications for permits and clearances in the municipality, such as the Environmental Compliance Certificate (ECC) or Certificate of Non-compliance (CNC), among others.
Cristine Dunca, of the branch’s Property in General Section, said one of their major roles is to find new technology to improve the document archiving system in their records section.
In the past, hard copies of applications would be filed into folders and placed in ceiling-high shelves. To retrieve a file, staff would need to check a logbook and go through thousands of folders stacked upon one another, unidentifiable with its fading labels. File safety also became an issue when hard copies were lost and, in some cases, eaten by termites, which made it extremely difficult for the staff to recover records.
This was when the EMB San Fernando office decided they needed a change, by using the Epson WorkForce DS-310 and DS-530 scanners.
“We considered its quality, durability, affordability and its environmental friendliness,” Dunca said. “We explored Epson products in 2018 and found that their scanners can improve the workflow of our records section.”
DS-310 is portable, compact and lightweight. It can fit into small spaces, allowing the branch to use their desk space more efficiently. With scanning speeds of up to 50ipm and automatic feeding mode, large volumes of documents can be scanned continuously.
DS-310 has a dedicated card slot for plastic cards, and a maximum scan size of up to 215.9 x 1,117.6mm, so that it can cater to different document sizes that the DENR-EMB San Fernando branch receives for different permit and clearance applications.
DS-530 is another versatile workforce scanner of the DENR-EMB San Fernando branch that complements the DS-310. Boasting a scan speed of up to 70ipm, the DS-530 handles a wide variety of media between 27-413 gsm, allowing the branch to scan anything from papers to plastic cards efficiently. Different groups can also access the same file through ethernet connectivity, allowing different departments to be aligned and workflow smoother.
“Thanks to Epson, we can provide our clients with efficient service and fulfill the Environmental Management Bureau’s goal of safeguarding the environment,” said Ma. Theresa Pangilinan, Head of Records Section, DENR-EMB San Fernando, Pampanga.
The digital revolution may have ushered in the age of the paperless office, but for many businesses in the Philippines, massive quantities of data are still generated in hard copy. Government bodies, like DENR-EMB, still create mountains of paper records through form-filling, reporting, accounts, book-keeping, and much more. A digital archiving system that holds, protects and integrates documents in a central, secure location is an essential component of modern business practice.