End users will not embrace a solution that asks them to enter all the meta data themselves nor should they. It is simply not productive. In a busy environment you cannot have people fumbling with a virtual keyboard to input data for a scan job while the line behind them grows.
This is where software comes into play which will "read" the scanned image and capture relevant metadata to attach to the document for indexing in the DMS. Relieving the user of this burden and getting the most productive benefit from the MFP.
Even if you are simply scanning to a folder being able to embed metadata in the file name would help with the search process.