Recordsforce Helps Firms Make Molehill Out Of Mountain Of Paper

by P.J. Heller

Remember all that talk about the “paperless office?” Forget it.

“More paper was used in 2008 than any prior year,” according to Bill Becker, president of Recordsforce in Portsmouth, N.H. “2008 was another world record paper sales year.”

That spells good news for Becker, who along with his wife Katja, started the document scanning and management business in 2001 in the basement of their home. Becker previously worked in California for several imaging firms, including Anacomp, a document imaging company, and FicheNet Imaging Solutions, a company he formed with two friends.

Even with the use of reams of paper soaring — some estimates say the average office worker uses 20,000 sheets of paper every year — Recordsforce is doing what it can to help business reign in its voracious appetite for paper.

Decades after some predicted that paper would disappear from offices, touting digital technology for applications ranging from medical X-rays to business e-mail, such predictions have turned out to be pulp fiction.

“Paper is still a very strong business tool,” Becker notes. “It’s the only universal medium for businesses to communicate with one another... And it’s physical and tangible. It represents something real.

“I think the role paper plays in business is well established and will continue to be the preferred way of doing business for most people for a long time,” he says.

But paper and other documents that can be digitized — such as medical X-ray films, accounts payable records and human resources files — often provide problems for businesses. Not only must companies dedicate valuable office space to an ever-growing mountain of material, but retrieving and then properly refiling documents can be costly, time-consuming and error-prone.

That’s where an outside service bureau such as Recordsforce can help, Becker insists. And in the current economic crisis, such services are more valuable than ever, he says.

“In economic downturns, as well as good times, we’re an attractive service because we help to save money,” Becker says. “We help reduce expenses and let companies do more with fewer people.

“In the current economic crisis we’re facing, being able to do more with less and not have it cost a lot to get involved in is a very attractive alternative to huge infrastructure projects or giant layoffs,” he says. “With the markets so dismal, companies are looking at how they can outsource things so they don’t have to carry overhead or have to lay people off and the costs of all that. So outsourcing gives you a way to engage with a service but not be committed to it with the same level as if they hired employees.”

Recordsforce makes it easy and inexpensive for businesses to decrease their paper load through scanning and document management. There are no up-front costs for capital hardware or software, Becker notes, something businesses would face if launching a similar service in-house. The biggest hesitations companies have, he says, are the cost factor and trying to determine if the service is right for them.

“It’s a very low impact entry into our services,” he says. “We make it affordable up-front so the companies can try it out. We provide them an inexpensive way to dip their toe in the pool.”

That approach has proved highly successful for Recordsforce, which has grown to 20 employees and is on track to earn $2 million in sales. It operates four scanners, capable of duplex imaging 125 pages per minute, about 14 hours a day.

That’s a far cry from when Becker and his wife started Accelerated Imaging in the basement of their home with one Kodak 3950C scanner.

A few months after launching the business, the couple had little choice but to relocate to larger quarters. That move came after they landed a major account with a pharmaceutical company based in Massachusetts.

“We were forced to get a real office location because they were coming to do a site visit. We couldn’t have them come to the house,” Becker says with a laugh.

So they moved into a 1,500-square-foot office and hired a few employees “so it wouldn’t be just me and my wife when they showed up for the meeting,” he recalls.

“That was how things started... very slow but in our business it builds because you create a relationship with a client and you’re managing the records forever after that,” he says.

Today, after a company name change to Recordsforce and a move into a 6,000-square-foot office, the company is not only providing document scanning services but also hosting those digital files on its Web servers (files on CD are also available). The company utilizes the FileBound contact management system from Martex to make documents readily available online to its growing list of clients. Those clients range from a three-person shipping company to a major office retailer with 30,000 employees.

“We really can service all different types of business in all sectors and of all sizes,” Becker says. “It’s really driven by a company’s own processes and how much problem paper is for them. That dynamic can be different even for two companies in the same industry. If they have lots of extra office space and a low cost of labor, they may be willing to live with paper files longer than a company that’s employing higher-paid professionals in class A office space. They’re going to be more sensitive to the pressure of paper than their cousin down the street.”

Becker sees the role of Recordsforce as not only helping companies reduce the amount of paper already generated, but helping them stay paperless by streamlining their operations utilizing the contact management system. He cites e-mail as an example of documents that people tend to print to put into a customer file or an accounts payable file. By utilizing the contact management system, that same e-mail can remain in digital form, stored in an archive where it can be accessed online as well as replied to or forwarded to others.

“E-mail is just one example where companies struggle to manage information,” Becker notes. “It’s not just on paper.” However, Becker says his company can provide similar solutions for paper documents, such as invoices. By setting up a post office box to directly receive the invoices, Recordsforce can then scan the paper documents and transmit the electronic files to a company’s accounts payable department. It also can attach an image of the invoice to the document.

Such a system not only saves companies from ever having to handle the paper documents, but allows Recordsforce to move from being a regional firm to one that can serve companies nationwide.

While companies could do document scanning and management in-house, Becker says they simply can’t do it as cost-effectively as his outside service bureau.

“We absolutely are less expensive than an in-house scanning operation,” he says. “What a lot of companies underestimate is what their own internal labor costs will be for scanning. They tend to think of it [scanning] as a technology solution. They underestimate the human requirements.”

Four employees are dedicated to each scanner that Recordsforce operates, he notes.

“Imaging is a labor solution,” Becker explains. “It’s pulling staples, then it’s scanning, then it’s indexing. Then you have management overseeing all of those activities. There’s only one piece of technology involved and that’s the scanner. It’s really just a commodity compared to all the other activities. The person doing the prep work actually has to think more about what they’re doing than the person running the scanning equipment.”

Becker also cites the fact that documents handled by Recordsforce are typically more secure than at many of his client’s locations, where paper files may be stored in unlocked file cabinets in hallways.

“Even though it [our contact management system] is over the Internet, it’s far more secure than what those companies are able to achieve when they’re using paper,” he says.

Becker recognizes that as companies go green, the amount of paper they use will decline.

“Businesses are moving more and more to paperless environments through keeping information that’s digital in digital form through its life cycle,” he says. “The truth is that in our business we’ll never run out of paper, but there will be less paper in some businesses to go after. So maybe some of the easiest places to find business today, like accounts payable and human resources, will not be as juicy in the future because those areas that struggle the most will have the incentive to invest in paperless automation technologies... which will allow them to eliminate a majority of paper involved in the process.”

Even so, Becker isn’t worried. He says there still will be plenty of existing or “legacy” paper to deal with, to put online and to keep companies paperless going into the future.

“Even though companies may eliminate or reduce the amount of paper that they have, there’s still going to be a need for document conversion services to get to a 100 percent paperless environment,” he says. “There’s always going to be some paper that needs to be scanned. The biggest focus is going to be on the content management side, on developing solutions that allows companies to stay paperless. That definitely is part of our business.

“In terms of the imaging business, I think it’s got huge potential,” Becker says. “I think the future is very bright for us.”