In today's increasingly information-based business world, managing paper-based documents represents a serious challenge to many businesses. Paper documents are the major information base of a business, but because their information content  can be difficult to process and not readily accessible, it is often excluded  from critical decision making processes. A non-automated, paper-based manual process makes it difficult to obtain "information at your finger tips" or to get "the right information to the right person at the right time." 

Document imaging is a technology that converts paper-based information into electronic format, thereby making it readily accessible. By scanning paper documents into electronic images, all the benefits and power of database and storage technology can be applied to what was once manually processed information. Image documents can be electronically filed and then quickly and easily retrieved. They can also be shared among multiple users that are local, distributed across the hall, or halfway around the world with equal ease.