"Stafford company chops down the mountains of documents that can clutter offices."
Stafford -- Office clutter means big business for the document imaging industry, where companies turn paperwork into electronic files.
Byron B. Aulick, co-owner of DataVault, Inc. in Stafford, has made client access to their own documents via the Internet his company's niche.
For 17 years in Massachusetts and Virginia, Aulick sold computer hardware and software that allowed companies to convert their paper to electronic files, a process known as document imaging. Companies then can call up the files on their own computers.
Last March, Aulick, 43, and his wife April, 33, moved to Stafford and created DataVault. The company scans and organizes documents for public and private organizations then allows the customer to retrieve, print and e-mail the files through the World Wide Web. "We don't sell anything to the client," Aulick said, "we just provide the service."
Other companies in the "application service provider" industry, like Chicago-based Global DocuGraphiX, scan files on CD-ROMs, or keep them on remote servers to conserve companies' computer memories. But Internet access offers a much more convenient way to retrieve and scan through data, Aulick said.
Aulick and his five staff members receive box loads of documents, from legal contracts to receipts, to handwritten notes, and put them through a high-speed scanner.
For every document the scanner creates a computer file, which DataVault sends to its 10-member Kingston, Jamaica, staff to merge into a customized index.
The files and indexes are sent back to DataVault, where Aulick's staff checks and saves them onto backup CD-ROMs before transferring them via the Internet to a massive database (called a "server farm") in Columbus, IN.
The database connects to the Internet, where the customer, with the correct password, can retrieve and decode the encrypted files from any Internet portal.
The whole process can take as little as two days, Aulick said.
One of Aulick's clients, a Virginia gas company, had DataVault scan 336,000 cards showing the location of gas lines near individual houses. Now, before a construction company digs near a house, the gas company can find the lines in minutes, not hours, Aulick said.
"Because the information is in a database, the files are only one second away from the people in the field," he said.
DataVault's customers pay a setup fee plus $22 an hour for the company to prepare the boxes of paper data. They then pay 10 cents a page for document scanning, though the price goes down, the higher the volume. There can be other backup data-storage costs, as well as a monthly retrieval fee.
Aulick said his service costs less than paper storage or for paying an outside company to index, file, and retrieve documents. He estimated that to maintain one file cabinet filled with 10,000 pages could cost a company $6, 222.50 a year by utilizing traditional filing methods.
Aulick continues to train companies, called CDIA training, on how to store and retrieve their own files, charging them for three- and five-day sessions.
He said he moved to Stafford partly because it was a great place to raise his four children but also because of its proximity to Hartford, Springfield and Boston.
Although the Internet makes it possible to work with companies around the world, Aulick said he hopes to tap into Hartford's insurance market, and for that, face-to-face demonstrations can be effective.
He said he hopes someday to move his office to downtown Hartford but has more immediate dreams: to employ handicapped staffers to scan documents and to establish a day-care center to attract single parents who need flexible schedules.
"Our goal is to offer people who are in wheelchairs, and single mothers raising small children, a chance to be more self-sustaining," Aulick said, "all they need are good hands, eyes, and brains."
He declined to say how many clients his company has but said they include manufacturing and construction companies, individuals, utility companies, and state agencies.
Aulick said DataVault is negotiating a contract with Connecticut's Department of Environmental Protection, which wants to put aerial photographs on the Internet for public access.
Convincing organizations to "outsource" their documents to a company like DataVault can be a challenge, he said. Information technology staff "is afraid to relinquish control," he said. "They want to mandate where the process takes place."
Aulick contends his company does not abolish jobs that indexing librarians normally provide but gives such people the chance to do less tedious work.
"I've never seen a situation where staff goes away," he said.
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