Products ERS V Retention Schedules USCS Defining a USC System How USC Works USC with ERS USC Presentation   Introducing: UNIFORM SUBJECT CLASSIFICATION SYSTEM What Is USCS Our patented Uniform Subject Classification (USCSTM) system is a unique system which applies classification codes to information objects such as electronic files or physical documents. USCS is "Uniform" in that it is designed to achieve uniformity in the classification process. That means that different users of USCS (even if they are at different divisions in different countries) will assign the same classification code when dealing with similar documents. USCS identifies Subject matter by maintaining a database of synonyms which act as a thesaurus. These synonyms may include industry or company specific jargon. USCS is considered Interlingual in that these synonyms can even be the foreign terms used at international divisions of the enterprise. USCS arrives at its Classification by taking into account the subject matter of the document as well as who created the document. The person who creates the document will bring into play additional knowledge that helps to classify the document. These attributes include the company chart of accounts and its organization chart. What IS The Purpose of USCS The purpose of USCS is to assign a single, appropriate classification code to every record or document. In order to meet all the requirements of a Sarbanes\Oxley document management system, it is necessary to develop a technique for classifying documents by subject. The challenges involved in the integration of information include the necessity to create and maintain a single classification system that can manage all forms of information, including paper, digital, microfilm and other media.  USCS completely addresses this requirement. By applying USCS to all documents, a unified system is possible for all information assets, unlike the current chaotic state of affairs where each department filing system has its own rules and conventions. The USCS system provides a hierarchically structured, subject oriented database, populated with terms in current use by the enterprise (i.e., chart of accounts and organizational chart) and by legislative references which pertain to the retention of documents. USCS attributes provide a tracking mechanism to enable protecting, finding and retrieving a document, or group of documents and to locate and destroy them when their life-cycle has been completed. By creating an official set of terms for the enterprise, all of the information can be reliably managed and precisely retrieved. Rather than simply instituting yet another set of rigidly defined classifications,  USCS  uses generic classification headings in a simply-structured hierarchy providing an umbrella over all existing categorization schemes. Thus, without requiring any changes to existing schemes, USCS directs the user to a single, appropriate classification heading for the document they wish to index. What's wrong with keyword or full-text search? Nothing! Except that it should be used as the search technique of last resort. Too much "noise" is created, making it time-consuming and difficult to separate the useless from the important.  Thus Data Mining can be cumbersome, wasteful of time and resources and generates search results that are much too broad. USCS reduces the scope of the search to a  meaningful number of choices that materially assist in identifying the correct choice. USCS substantially reduces the need to resort to the more cumbersome Keyword and Text Search techniques. USCS search methodology Our patented USCS typically reduces search time up to 90%. Full text searches become far more efficient, when they are required, because the classification substantially reduces the search arena. Traditionally, searching has been done using file attributes, keywords, and full text searching,  presenting far more time consuming and non-productive results. With USCS, searching is fast and easy. Only 2 or 3 pieces of information need to be entered in order to rapidly find the document, eliminating the need for costly full-text searching. By entering a descriptive term that best describes what you are looking for, you can search for active documents or archived records. Because of the global scope of USCS, the use of foreign language terms in the synonym database makes it possible for the system to uniformly classify documents using any language. With this range of flexibility, a unique classification tool exists for any multi-national information system.