Managing Paper Documents with Paperless NGX and hp-scan-to-node Integration

Background

As explained in prior project, Hawaiian Paradise Coffee wanted to improve their process with scanning physical documents. I evaluated the standard operations that the employee would come to work after-hours and scan documents one by one. The number of documents include invoices, picking tickets, work orders, and sales orders. I made the recommendation of utilizing Paperless NGX (leveraging its' native OCR function) and hp-scan-to-node which processes the physical documents when it placed to the feeder.

Current Operation

  1. Drivers and Order Desk would leave all the physical documents in a file cabinet

  2. Employee that scans the document would come into work after-hours and feed the documents through a scanner

  3. Employee would take the digitally scanned document and rename each one of them for basic file management lookup

  4. Employee would then drop the processed digital file on the network shared drive

  5. To find a document, the users will need access to the shared drive and also know the document name to find it

Proposed Operation

  1. Gather all the paper documents

  2. Place all the paper documents in the printer feeder

  3. Once the printer process the paper automatically through hp-scan-to-node, it will be uploaded to the Paperless NGX server

  4. Users can then utilize the Paperless NGX GUI to search for their scanned documents with OCR

Video Demonstration

Conclusion

The standing operation with scanning physical documents with a single scanner and an employee feeding hundreds and hundreds of documents and renaming each single one is time-consuming. I leveraged the integration of Paperless NGX and hp-scan-to-node to improve process efficiency. Allowing the scanner to automatically scan the feed paper documents and organizing it all in a document management system will save time compared to the manual process. The OCR feature in NGX will quickly allow the users to search for their documents by the content rather than a file name - this allow a more dynamic lookup. Furthermore, we can leverage Paperless NGX system to grant granular access to each users as it is no longer dependent on a network shared drive access.