Records companies can store documents for their protection — or destroy them

By Hope Nealson, correspondent

The 2008 floods changed many lives and business. But it also changed how many companies store information.

“It's huge. At least 80 percent of our clients are using some kind of electronic scanning solution in one shape or form,” said Koch Brothers Sales Supervisor Tracy Meyers. “After the flood here in Cedar Rapids, (digitizing records) certainly increased.”

In Meyers's 20 years at Koch Brothers, the digital age has transformed and boosted the document storage industry.

Koch Brothers, 228 Northland Court NE, Cedar Rapids, also sells office products. The company opened its first store in Des Moines in 1889, where it's still headquartered.

“We're the oldest company in the state that has offered the resource of storing records,” Meyers said.

Meyers said before 2008, the products they offer - such as the paperless document management software systems docSTAR and ScanFile - weren't as sought after in Cedar Rapids. Now the products are so popular, the prices have come down significantly.

“There are a lot of benefits to going digital - space benefits, disaster recovery benefits and certainly the cost - compared to a paper file,” he said.

“There is a significant cost factor (to paper), not only in buying the space to store the documents but also the paper consumption itself and consumables.”

Another longtime Corridor business, Kenwood Records Management, 4001 44th Ave. SW, began as a document storage and shredding operation 25 years ago, and now also provides a paperless option.

Nevertheless, Kenwood Records Management Manager Matt Usher said the company still shreds “thousands and thousands of pounds” of paper in a year for clients.

“I can tell you there are hundreds of thousands of boxes that need to be stored that represent millions and millions of documents,” Usher said.

Those boxes, he added, are stored in an off-site location.

Usher said business at Kenwood Records Management, which employs about 30, has been steadily on the increase due to a number of factors, including the flood - and the law.

“There has been a lot of legislation over the past decade especially that has dictated companies keep better track of their records and archive them for a longer period of time,” he said.

“And there is the medical arena, and HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act). Although (the laws) are there to protect patient information, I think it has caused people to be even more conservative with the length of time they conserve documents and the amount they return (to us).”

Usher said he noticed an increase in the demand for digital after electronic files were given the same legal clout as the paper documents.

Usher said an advantage of converting records to digital is their digital imaging operation and digital electronic solutions allow businesses to retrieve documents online as well as to back up those records, creating multiple copies.

“Once you've digitized it, you can back it up a multitude of ways,” he said. “You can create backup media and store it in multiple places.

“If some formats and methods become obsolete, you need to migrate to the new storage media.”

Usher added the most frequent customers are companies that have thousands of documents to store.

“The larger the business, it seems the larger the need,” Usher noted.

Jeffrey Kiley, chief operating officer for the Advantage Companies, noted that scanned documents can range in size from Post-it notes to blueprints or drawings.

Advantage is headquartered in Cedar Rapids at 1035 33rd Ave. SW, with offices in Minneapolis and Des Moines. One of the five companies in the group, the Advantage Preservation company, stores historical documents such as historical newspaper collections, genealogy books and church records by microfilming for 500-year preservation.

“We've invested in the infrastructure, software, hardware and backup power generation,” Usher explained. For the paper documents, “we use bar codes systems to track the items we store as they go in and out of our facilities as the customers request them.”

But, Usher added, that at its core, the industry is still the same after all these years.

“The base hasn't changed a whole lot but the other peripheral services have,” he said. “There is still an extensive amount of paper that exists at many businesses. Some choose to convert it to digital, some choose to maintain the hard copy storage.”