Company Flourishes in Current Economic Climate

By Monique Williams

In the current economic climate, you’d be hard-pressed to find a company that’s actually flourishing, but that is the case with Docufree Corporation, a Roswell, Georgia company of some 157 employees. While others are cutting down to the bone, Docufree is keeping its sales force busy and happy.

What accounts for the growth and success of Docufree are products and services that businesses are seeking in times of hardship. Yep. As the misery factor rises all around, so do their sales numbers.

Docufree’s story began some 10 years ago when the company was known as Innosource. Guinn and Brad Jenkins, a father and son team and Rodney Cole, a family member, began a copying and printing service to companies with large scanning needs such as legal firms. As natural evolution will have it, the team progressed to scanning the incoming mail of companies and pretty soon that too evolved to include the onsite and offsite management of mailroom operations which they staffed with their own employees.

Their client list grew to include companies like Equifax and ADP. The team’s expertise became document management – documents that could be captured, scanned, managed, stored and shared. Over the years, their work evolved to include other functions such as archiving and destruction of documents.

In study after study, the growth numbers of digital content are so voluminous that the research firm IDC--in a study appropriately named The Digital Information Ballooning – estimated that digital content for last year alone (structured and unstructured) added to 12 stacks of books that each reach the sun. That’s three million times the information in all the books ever written or 161 billion gigabytes – 161 exabytes – of digital information. And that’s expected to metastasize.

Unlike other sectors of the economy that are seeing a lull or a decline, document management is one segment of the technology sector that is growing. Reasons that account for this growth is compliance, cost and security. Beginning with compliance, the rules that companies have to follow in a regulatory climate are dizzying and many struggle with how to comply with complex regulations such as Sarbanes-Oxley. What do you do with documents once they are scanned? How does anyone control the volume of documents that companies receive and file? How do you dispose of personal information such as social security numbers or medical information?

These questions and the security concerns of post 9/11 which included mail contamination, in addition to costs that companies incur by creating their own solutions are behind the growth of business process outsourcing (BPO) and document management.

Although offshore outsourcing of back-office functions has taken a public flogging because of the resulting job losses, a trend that is decidedly growing stronger is the outsourcing of services within the United States (or insourcing as it is often called). The main reasons companies outsource their business operations are to improve cash flow and reduce operational costs in addition to creating efficiencies. By insourcing, a company can then focus on its core business strategies by allowing another firm to handle invoices, remittance processing and even mailroom operations.

Business process outsourcing was once relegated to repetitive functions such as accounting; it has, however, grown at an accelerated rate to include other functions that were once done by in-house staff. The research firm Forrester Research estimated that BPO will grow to $146 billion in 2008. However, with the economy in a slump, when the final numbers are tabulated, it will probably prove to be a significant underestimate.

As more companies sought out vendors to help manage the influx of documents, InnoSource saw their client list grow to include blue-chip companies alongside small to mid-sized companies. They soon realized that after capturing and digitizing information, businesses needed a way to store, share and manage the information in order to speed up their internal processes.

For the Jenkins, Cole and their business partners, the natural segue for their document management and business process outsourcing services was to create a repository for documents, an on-demand application that would eliminate the need for medium-size companies to incur heavy capital investment, increase IT staff and purchase servers to accommodate an ever-growing content.

Two years ago, Docufree was launched and within one year the application was hailed as one of the most innovative document management and business solution of the year. 2007 was a banner year – the company made it on the Inc.5000 list as one of the fastest growing companies in America and subsequently received the SoftwareCEO innovation award for Docufree.

The application is a powerful algorithm that stores documents in a secure manner, creates a workflow, uses indexes for easy search, and integrates with all business software including accounting systems heavyweights like Great Plains and SAP. It requires no hardware or software to deploy, just an Internet connection and a subscription.

“At the end of the day,” says Cole “the goal is to provide information access to our clients and to increase the velocity of information.”

Docufree’s inherent feature is the elimination of paper and the easy retrieval and management of documents. According to the Gartner Group, some 25% of all enterprise documents will never be located. And to make matters worse, the group estimates that some 20 to 30% of time is wasted managing document-based information outside of automated systems.

Timing could not have been more perfect for launching a product that eliminates paper and clutter in the office. The greening of America and the reduction of carbon footprints is a mission companies are fervently embracing as consumers demand more ecological focus. But going green is not only an ecologically smart move; it has enormous cost-cutting benefits. Going green saves green.

With GPS-tracked couriers and business centers around the country that provide scanning services and process inbound mail, the company is poised to expand its services even further by providing a continuance of services and positioning itself as unique in the document management community.

“We are very unique as a company,” says David Winkler, Executive Vice-President for Corporate Development. “We fill a huge gap in the market today by providing our customers with single point of accountability for their mission-critical applications associated with paper to digital work process automation and document management. Put another way, we’re one belly button to push for all of your on-demand services as software for business process automation and document management. ”

While competitors provide segments of the same services, the company’s linear services are what sets it apart. From creation to destruction, it provides total document management. It picks up the mail at airports, brings it to business centers that are equipped with the latest technology in digital mail, processes it, scans it, loads it into Docufree and when it’s done with the hard copy, it sends it off to business partners where it’s either stored or shredded.

The company uses DocuFree’s digital mail center to process the hundreds of thousand of mail pieces that arrive daily to its business centers. Digital mail is not scanned mail. Companies have long outsourced their mailrooms to vendors where mail was scanned with no chain of custody onto whatever platform or network the company had. Digital mail is digitized from point-of-entry, bar-coded, tracked through the entire flow, all in real-time. It’s a quantum leap across the mailroom that goes straight to the end-users’ desks.

“Magic occurs with digital mail,” says Joe Incognito, a mailroom expert and CEO of Creative Management Services, “and it takes one person to do what six used to do manually.”

The mail center speeds up the volume of inbound mail that is processed and can be adjusted to process as many as 10,000 pieces an hour. It distributes letters, magazines and small parcels into an assortment of delivery bins in one single swoop. Moreover, the mail center can be tailored to sort by name, building, floor, department or person.

The machines are outfitted with wireless robotic intelligence that uses recognition and database software, an image capture system and wireless communication that delivers the mail into the appropriate bin. The documents that are captured are a mix of documents – accounts payable, receivables, contracts, claims, payments, human resources forms – pretty much anything and everything.

This leap accelerates the delivery of images, shrinks the distribution time and in the case of accounts payable shaves off days from the process of depositing monies in the bank. Ideal companies for such processes are insurance companies, healthcare, credit cards companies and others who process at least 100,000 pieces a month.

Combining digitized mail with Docufree is like a booster shot in the arm. It automates the mailroom and drives efficiencies throughout the organization by jump-starting the workflow process right out of the mailroom. Once the mail is digitized, Docufree assigns a barcode to incoming mail and its contents while its optimal character recognition recognizes the document and extracts key information.

“Docufree got me real excited,” says Incognito who has road-tested digital mail and Docufree, “the productivity measurement within Docufree – no one has it.”

Digital mail is a process that has met its share of resistance. It is estimated that less than five% of mailrooms are outfitted with digital mail. The process is so new there is no real data to support the financial aspects of owning or running a digital mail center. In an article titled “Changeor Perish”, Incognito states that mailroom culture (the we-have-never-done-it-this-way-before crowd) and resistance to change is what blocks companies from embracing better and faster modalities. Incognito is a strong proponent of the digitalization of the mailroom to reduce costs and increase efficiencies. He calls it “fiscal survival.”

The business drivers behind the outsourcing of business processes and the mailroom as well as the adoption of software-as-a-service such as Docufree are to improve cash flow, reduce costs and headcount, increase efficiency and security, employee turnover and loss of knowledge.

Incognito believes that a company can justify the cost of going digital if their inbound mail is between 75,000 to 100,000 pieces a day. But for those companies that can’t afford the expenses associated with a digital mailroom, Incognito recommends the outsourcing of their mailroom operations. “But,” he adds, “be sure you select the right vendor.”

So as companies get greener and paper reduction becomes the norm, green may become the favorite color at Docufree.

For more about Docufree on-demand or Digital Mail services as software, go to http://www.docufree.com or call toll free 877-362-3569.

Monique Williams is a business writer and can be reached at moniquedwilliams@gmail.com .