DataScan Does Volume Business by Ending the Paper Chase
With all the meeting agendas, minutes, reports and contracts generated by government offices, longtime Ventura City Clerk Barbara Kam has seen plenty of documents accumulate over the years. As more paper has been collected and stored, it has become increasingly cumbersome and more difficult to access.
“We have tons of paper--that’s a crucial problem for all areas of business, whether government or otherwise,” Kam said. “Doing something about it generally falls low in terms of priority, but it’s becoming more and more important as we go along in our sophisticated age.”
To help lighten the paper load, Kam turned to DataScan Inc., a Ventura-based company that contracts with clients to transfer data from paper to either computer disk or secured Internet sites.
Founded in the early 1990s as the Zelo Group, DataScan originally worked with law firms, managing documents and providing quick access to information for trial lawyers in the courtroom. The privately held company has since branched out to include businesses and other organizations.
“If you’re not taking care of your records, you’re not taking care of business,” Kam said. “They scanned all our contracts and agreements for about the last five years and put them onto CD.”
The city clerk’s office also has set up its own computer programs to store information.
“It gives us quick access and it gives other departments access,” Kam said. “If the treasury office had to find agreements that might have revenue associated with them, they used to have to go through a very laborious effort. If they had it on disk they could have made the determination very quickly.”
DataScan President Joel Rayden said his business primarily has been built by word of mouth. Many corporate executives are unaware of the need for and availability of computer-based storage of information, he said.
“The way we sell it is you’re going to gain a lot of efficiency in storing and retrieving information and, as a byproduct, we back up information and store it in fireproof vaults off site,” Rayden said.
“We are a service bureau, where we take customers’ documents--insurance claims, X-rays, anything--and convert it to digital form,” he said. “So now you can access the information very quickly over the computer rather than deal with boxes and file cabinets of paper.”
For some clients, instead of creating a CD reference library, DataScan stores the information on a secure Web site and either manages the site itself or creates a system at the client’s office.
DataScan’s clients have included the Conejo Recreation and Parks District, First Federal Bank, U.S. Diagnostics, Topanga Oil Co., the Los Angeles and Ventura district attorney’s offices, Amgen, the Southern California Orthopedic Institute and the Adventist Media Center.
Last week, the company received approval from the Ventura City Council on a contract to digitally scan, index and store records for the Police Department.
“They have boxes and boxes of documents and police reports which they are required to keep forever,” Rayden said. “They are out of storage room, and they need to access those documents.”
Other recent DataScan jobs have included scanning and storing box office receipts for Warner Bros., a year’s accounting records for Cal Lutheran University, loan documents for Goleta National Bank and legal data on the La Conchita landslide case.
Perhaps the company’s most notable assignment was working with plaintiff’s attorneys in a 1996 environmental lawsuit against Pacific Gas & Electric Co. The 650 plaintiffs from Hinkley, Calif., won a $333-million settlement after claiming that cancer and other diseases were caused by contaminated water leaking from a gas pumping station.
“We had a zillion documents we had to scan, prepare and put in the computer for attorneys to do research and go to trial,” Rayden said. “We were up against Pacific Gas & Electric and guess how many resources they had.”
Herb Swensen, chief financial officer of the Simi Valley-based Adventist Media Center, said his 200-employee religious broadcasting company contracted with DataScan in lieu of purchasing a $100,000 vault in which to store documents.
Accounting information has been transferred to disk--a move that in part led to downsizing of the accounting staff from eight to seven full-time employees. The Adventist Media Center also operates five trust offices and plans to transfer 1,200 trust files, dating back 20 years, from paper to disk.
“The old way to get through the information is the sneaker network--you get up and find it,” Rayden said. “We can do it electronically.”
Rayden formed the Zelo Group in 1992. In 1997 the company went public and merged with the Brightstar Information Technology Group, a Houston-based firm organized to acquire companies providing information technology products and services to large organizations and businesses. After the initial public offering, Zelo separated from Brightstar and became DataScan.
The company, with 35 employees, operates out of a 4,000-square-foot facility that runs 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Rayden said he plans to open additional sites in Atlanta and Chicago over the next six months for sales and processing in those regions.
“We have a lot of opportunities out there,” he said. “Instead of shipping boxes here, we can handle them there.”
Rayden said the health-care industry could provide much of the work in coming years.
“Health care is getting squeezed--doctors need to have more patients; they’re required to do more paperwork to maintain their patients,” he said. “They have patient files that are very, very active, traveling from one place to another. We put the files on a secured Internet server so the primary doctor and other authorized users can have access.”
