Import scanned legal contracts into servicenow fields?

[paw2]

Has anyone implemented a way to get, paper contracts and/or scanned images of contracts, into actual discreet fields in ServiceNow without manual input of thousands of contracts?

Not referring to attaching the scanned document.

This would be two aspects:

1) historical paper contracts, or historical electronic scanned contracts

2) new contracts .... so could use software (perhaps even Word with macros) to embed certain fields that could then convert to Excel and then import into ServiceNow ..... or something.

[thisisstupid]

Hello Patricia,

I think you have the right idea.   If you have thousands of documents I would recommend investing in a good quality batch scan pdf to excel application. You may be able to find one for free - (link: Google).   You can then automate the import the excel documents.   You won't want one where   you have to use the OCR software (the software that reads the document and interprets it) one document at a time.

If you can batch the contracts into templates that are uniform for a given bunch it will be super useful, and you can then place the converted excel documents of each template type into a separate folder on an FTP/FTPS.   You would probably want to have all contracts you converted of a certain template/type to be converted into the SAME excel document as a new worksheet.

From there you would set up your data source, and you would fill out your file path and make sure you're importing excel, and choose the worksheet/row number you wish to start at (1,0 I think).

The next step would be to configure a scheduled job that runs the data source and includes a pre-import script.   That script, after the first run, would increment the worksheet number by 1, and retrieve the same file but process a different worksheet (+=1).

Finally, you'd need to configure your transform maps and you're good to go.   You would not have to create a different data source/scheduled job/pre-import script for each one, but it may make sense.

Also, you don't have to use excel.   Just spitballing, but off the top of my head that's where I'd start.

-Will