Long before COVID-19 concerns impacted businesses everywhere, manufacturing HR departments faced a significant task of managing the records of past and current employees. This process requires inputting sensitive personnel information into storage or ERP systems and well-established methods that maintain privacy.
Applications, identity documents, tax forms, training certifications and handwritten notes must be gathered, sorted and stored, yet easily accessible to share with authorized departments and individuals. With virtual interviews, lockdowns and staggered shifts becoming standard operating procedure, digitizing onboarding records so they can be stored easily is a crucial goal for many HR teams in the industry.
Streamlining a tedious process
Document scanners are the on-ramp to streamline these processes. By capturing documents and signatures and converting them into digital data, you can speed up the process of employee on-boarding, including integrating with records and HR management systems. Document scanners provide an easy and cost-effective way to digitize, organize and share documents across the company.
HR departments can save time, paper and space while adhering to privacy policies by providing a way to bring online so many types of paperwork, including:
- Employment contracts
- Official applications
- Employee identification documents
- Proof-of-nationality documents
- Direct deposit information
- Benefits selections
- Emergency contact information
Expediting onboarding in the office, on the factory floor, or virtually
Employee onboarding can be particularly paper-intensive. Some forms, like I9s and IDs, are legal or dictated by regulations and some forms, such as applications and banking information, maybe developed internally, but everyone must follow requirements for protecting personal information during and after onboarding. Digitizing and automating the processing can ensure timely results with none of the hassles associated with replacing lost paper records and identification.
Small, mobile, and Wi-Fi enabled scanners can be placed in any location—even the warehouse—and the HR rep can scan in documents efficiently, allowing a fast start to the worker's employment. Or, onboarding can be done in a traditional front-office, with a shared scanner that allows for a larger HR team to use as needed. Alternatively, employees who work from home can digitize directly from the home office, ensuring that the original documents remain in their possession.
Careful consideration should be given before determining which scanner model or models will meet the needs of a particular environment. For example, is it easy to use? It should be easy for staff who might be unfamiliar with scanners to set up and begin scanning without IT resources. Also, can it handle the types of documents that need digitizing? Scanning passports and other identification documents can be challenging to put through copy or scanning machines that are built for standard paper. Quality and clarity are also important, because illegible or fuzzy images of documents will hold up processes and can create room for error.
Another consideration is size. Typically, offices are small these days and you don't want a device that takes up a lot of room on a desk or requires its own workstation. And, as always, highly confidential information – like social security numbers and photo ID – must be saved in a secure manner and accessed only by authorized people. The selected scanner needs to work easily with the company's secure ERP system.
High quality, affordable scanning for in-office or mobile scanning needs
You can feel confident choosing fi Series scanner, because they offer superior feeding performance and industry-leading image quality, which leads to more accurate data and faster onboarding. To meet the unique needs of onboarding in the manufacturing industry, we recommend the fi-800R, fi-7300NX and fi-7700.
HR or reception offices benefit from the fi-800R, a small but mighty hard-working scanner that's built for easy passport, hard card and ID scanning. It's ideal for small spaces—just half the size of other scanners in its category. This one is perfect for entrance areas, onboarding kiosks and busy offices. It easily handles larger batches of various sized documents and features an automatic document feeder tray that holds 20 sheets at a time. The PaperStream Capture software included will also recognize pictures of faces and will automatically rotate and turn them around to the correct position.
The fi-7300NX works well when you need to scan in several, distributed locations. With Wi-Fi capability, HR administrators can quickly scan from the warehouse floor directly to a file server at reception or ERP system, no PC required. It comes with a large touchscreen with user-defined job buttons, plus user authentication, to ensure privacy and security. This scanner is fast—up to 60 pages per minute—and has the flexibility to scan various document sizes and thickness in a single batch.
Another option is the fi-7700, which features both an ADF feeder and flatbed, which can handle the volumes associated with a large HR team. With user-friendly design and focus on quality, this scanner is suitable for papers of different material, such as passports, plastic ID cards, books, forms and long page documents. It also comes with PaperStream IP, which lets you automatically convert documents or materials into exceptionally clear image data.
In addition, all models come with the popular PaperStream Capture Software, an advanced imaging application for accurate optical character recognition. The software can be used to clean up scanned images and automate tagging, file naming and workflow.