Recently, I vistied a facility that processes large batches of mortgage documents and student health records, and noticed something interesting. The scan operators were hand feeding each batch. I posed the question “why” and was told that due to the mixed documents included in each batch, hand feeds were necessary. The customer felt that it saves their organization time by just hand feeding instead of actually aligning the documents.
All of the scanners they use have center feed technology which, if the documents are not aligned to the center, causes jams, double feeds, etc..I asked them if they had considered “joggers” and suggested the Hitachi HT-4139. For those of you not familiar with joggers, they are inexpensive devices (usually $500-$800) that vibrate the documents all to the left front side.
There are several advantages to using a jogger. The documents are all positioned to the left front side so no need to worry about a pick roller not grabbing the document and it sneaking through riding on top of another document. Also, it takes out the electro static charge that causes pages to stick together.
Most production environments are using joggers as they allow for faster batch preparation. Also, they create and an increase in productivity and a decrease in an organization’s conversion and labor costs. The Hitachi HT-4139 has left feed technology, allowing for nearly error free scanning when using a jogger. Also, the unit has dual exit trays that allow for the sorting of exceptions documents such as patch and barcode sheets, checks, receipts and other document types that you may want to sort from the original batch.
The user was also impressed with the scanners ability to do tri-stream exporting. They have situations where they send a high resolution image to their indexing department for processing, another for archival of the original image and lastly a grayscale image is uploaded by their client via the internet. The outcome is an environment where batch preparation is quick and efficient using a jogger and the labor and conversion costs are down due to the features of the Hitachi HT-4139.
