E-Government to boost document management

The UAE's document management business is to experience 300 per cent growth, if industry statistics are to be believed.

The Electronic Document Management System (EDMS) market in the UAE is about Dh150 million this year and expected to grow at 25 to 35 per cent annually in the next four years, or over 300 per cent annual compound growth.

Industry sources hint that the development of e-business and the e-government initiative will be the main driver of EDMS in the coming years as it will require the government departments to store data file and information electronically rather than store them physically.

The explosive growth of the Internet has also added to the increased use of electronic data capture, to a point where much of the data in today's corporate world remains in electronic form from conception to ultimate destruction years later.

As a part of the e-government initiative, tens of thousands of documents are scanned every day at the various government organisations in the UAE.

"Converting physical paper into digital format is the latest trend in the effort to create a truly paperless e-office. The amount of documents produced daily is growing rapidly in these organisations and each and every activity needs to be recorded and stored by law," said Lars Bogvad Jeppesen, managing director of Valuevad, a Dubai-based imaging and storage distribution company focusing on distribution of document management hardware components.

"As a result of this, many local bodies like the municipalities, Police, Civil Aviation and financial institutions in the UAE have turned to document management solutions in an attempt to convert their paper mountains and extend access to critical business data across their respective enterprise."

Document management solutions which typically comprise a scanner, document management software and a storage element are also being deployed in most private organisations in this region such as banks, airlines and large commercial and industrial organisations which have a more advanced infrastructure and look towards making the document management solution a part of their overall IT systems simply because there is lot of paperwork involved in the day-to-day activities.

The EDMS business comprises electronic data and document capture; optical data storage; retrieval and display hardware and software, document management software and workflow software.

This growth, Jeppesen said, is driven by rapid corporate as well as government adoption of Electronic Document Capture technologies that allow for cheaper document handling processes and more efficient use of existing market and customer data.

Meanwhile, Kodak has recently introduced the New i200 Series Scanners which offer breakthrough technologies – many leveraged from Kodak's high-speed production scanners.

The new i200 Series scanners are now available from Valuevad. These scanners have been widely acclaimed by a number of distributors, integrators and test site customers and are already slated for installation in a variety of vertical markets from insurance to government agencies and financial institutions to transportation companies.

The i200 Series Scanners are designed to handle more than 5,000 pages per day, and up to 50 pages per minute (ppm) or 100 images per minute (ipm) at 200 dpi in colour, grayscale or bitonal. The scanners are the first truly modular family of desktop production scanning devices.