Our Unique Service

Essential can compete!

There is a plethora of document management solutions of various sorts in the market today. It can be mind-boggling even for the most well-informed manager to try to choose the most beneficial solution for his company.

One solution, often chosen in frustration at the number of choices, is the DIY method. By this we mean the person in charge of IT researches which scanner, which indexing and OCR software, and which management software will most suit the companys needs. This solution requires an enormous amount of time and effort on the part of the researcher. The staff training involved is extensive and because the components of the solutions were purchased separately, there is generally still quite a bit of manual labour involved to make it work. The initial cost to a company to implement such a solution is typically $30,000 - $50,000 and the yearly charge for maintenance of the scanner and the various software applications combined can be upwards of $6000. A very large company with a huge IT staff resource can make a do-it-yourself solution work.

Various IT service providers recognized the problem faced by businesses of finding a good document management system. They decided to take it upon themselves to do the research that would normally have been done by each individual business. They then assess the needs of an organization and propose a solution for document management. This solution is still component-based, the same as above, but the work involved in finding an appropriate solution is outsourced. Unfortunately, an organization going this route not only has to pay for a solution such as that described above, but also has to pay a fee to the company who did the research and assessment for them. Neither this solution nor the one above allows for off-site storage and backup. A very large company with sufficient financial resources but perhaps a small IT department might find this solution of benefit.

There are other companies who offer a document management service but they insist that the scanned documents be sent to them. These companies index the documents using a mixture of manual entry and OCR and then make the scanned and organized documents available on off-site servers. Because these companies do all the indexing and management themselves, they charge on a per document basis and the monthly fee becomes very high, while the initial setup fee must still be at least the cost of the content management application. Not only that, but the business who uses this type of service is at risk of losing some privacy as all documents are open to view by the service providers employees. This solution might be of benefit to medium to large sized businesses who want to organize paper documents which are of a non-sensitive nature.

Essential provides an out-of-the-box package solution for small to medium sized businesses. We have done the thinking and the research and we have partnered with leaders in the industry, IBM and Captiva, to create a ready-to-use product. There is no effort needed on the part of an IT team which is, in the case of many small businesses, already stretched to the limit. Our product is very user-friendly so training time is minimal. All scanning and indexing is handled on the customers premises and once the documents are uploaded to our secure servers, no-one has the rights to access the documents except the customer. No one sees your documents unless you allow it. Also, our servers are backed up every night; there is virtually no chance of losing data and there is no need to store any of these documents in your office, whether in paper form or electronic form! The initial cost is low because you pay for only the part of the software you need, and the monthly fees are minimal because we do not charge by the document. Our solution targets any business who wants a reliable, secure, trouble-free document management solution.