Hardware and Imaging Software. An image-enabled system can be set up easily with a personal computer, a CD-ROM player, a printer, and software to operate it properly. Assuming you have a personal computer, CD-ROM players cost around $100 and the imaging software is free or available at a very low cost. Obviously, only one person can use this system at a time and CD’s have to be manually changed if you have more then 15,000-document pages that can fit on one CD. However, it demonstrates how low cost it can be for an imaging system to be implemented. For multi-users to have concurrent access, you need a network and a multi CD-ROM player, (if you have more than 15,000 images).

Imaging Costs. The costs of scanning vary from vendor to vendor. It is important to compare apples to apples when obtaining quotes from vendors. Some of the cost factors in an imaging project include:

• Hardware;
• Software;
• Per page scanning;
• Indexing;
• Personnel;
• Training and Support.