There is an Easier Way
KeyMark’s document management technology leads to record growth
by Francis B. Allgood
fallgood [at] scbiznews [dot] com
The economic climate has certainly changed how many companies do business, but that’s not all bad news for companies like KeyMark Inc. On a recent Thursday afternoon, sitting on Jim Wanner’s desk is a contract from a new client in Louisiana awaiting his signature.
“We wouldn’t have won that deal two years ago, I guarantee that,” said the CEO of the Liberty-based document management company.
KeyMark automates business processes with document management, advanced data capture and workflow tools. They offer products and solutions that meet the special needs for health care, insurance, government and loan processing companies. They also offer document management services for accounts payable and receivable departments and company mailrooms. Phrased simply, “We scan documents so you can retrieve them as an image on a computer,” Wanner explains.
Over the past two years, larger companies have acquired many of the niche players in the content management and document capture industry. As a result, the major players are much weaker, Wanner said, as customer satisfaction has dropped, leaving KeyMark with a golden opportunity to win more clients.
The company’s biggest deal this year came out of Seattle. SeaBright Holdings Inc., an insurance company, selected KeyMark to implement Kofax Capture and the OnBase enterprise content management suite.
“You can’t walk into an organization in downtown Seattle that is a publicly traded company and beat out EMC (Corp.) unless you are actually better than they are,” Wanner said.
According to Wanner, the company’s revenue has grown 150% since it opened its 9,200-square-foot facility in the Pickens County Commerce Park in 2005. The company today has 40 employees with a client list that includes AnMed Health, BlueCross BlueShield of South Carolina, Clemson University, Denny’s Corp., First Sun Management Corp., Michelin NA, Resurgent Capital Services LP, ScanSource Inc. and Pickens County.
As companies are faced with financial challenges, many are turning to automated services.
“The reason why our year is going so well is the fact that people don’t want to rehire,” Wanner said. “They want to automate their business processes, so people are bringing us in left and right to automate as much as they can because they are anticipating growth in the future.”
Still, that doesn’t mean the document management industry and KeyMark haven’t been impacted by economic conditions. The industry witnessed a 37% drop in sales when the economy was at its worst, Wanner said.
KeyMark pulled back on plans to build a second facility on the 8.1 acres of land it owns at the industrial park. The long-term goal is to eventually build five units on the property.
But KeyMark has grown organically and through some acquisitions of its own. One company brought 33 customers to the table.
KeyMark began in 1989 as a marketing agency for pharmacies and technology companies, but the business model quickly changed in 1994 when it became a sub-dealer to Bacompt based in Indianapolis. The two parted ways just two years later as KeyMark was owed money, Wanner said, but the partnership forever changed KeyMark.
“They were the ones that actually introduced us to the industry,” he said. “Now we are three times larger than they ever dreamed of being.”
Today the company has software partners in AnyDoc Software Inc., Hyland Software, KnowledgeLake Inc., Kofax Transformation Modules and Notable Solutions Inc. It’s hardware partners include Fujitsu Computer Products of America Inc., IBML, Kodak and Opex Corp.
Two areas Wanner would like KeyMark to have a greater presence in is life sciences and government.
After the election, Wanner hopes legislators will take a closer look at petitioning the area as a HUB Zone under the U.S. Small Business Administration. Created in 1998, the program would make getting federal contracts easier as a historically underutilized business zone.
Wanner said Harrisburg, Va., home to James Madison University, is a HUB Zone, which is two hours from Washington, D.C. Wanner envisions a partnership with Clemson University to set up a software-as-a-service model to process human resources documents for companies across the U.S.
Reprinted with permission of GSA Business
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