Monday, March 21, 2005
RICHLAND - An abandoned industrial property on M-43 is slated for reincarnation this spring as a high-tech records management facility.
A start-up company called Storage Innovation Technologies Inc. purchased the former site of the Kalamazoo Plug Co. in Richland for $475,000 last October. The new owners are pumping an additional $1 million into updating the 50,000 square-foot facility, which has sat empty for eight years.
SITECH President Andrew Alspach would not reveal the number of investors in his business, but he told MiBiz that the individuals involved hail from both Southwest Michigan and outside the region.
Scheduled to open for business in May, the company will offer traditional paper records management, document destruction, "e-vaulting" for electronic data and disaster recovery.
"Disaster recovery is one feature you don't traditionally find in a business like this," said Alspach. "If a client has a major malfunction, whether it's a flood, fire or power outage, they can transfer their operations here, forward the phones and clients never have to know they missed a beat."
The e-vaulting is another unique aspect of the SITECH operation, Alspach said. His company will offer customized storage space for magnetic tapes, CDs and other electronic media, as well as on-site servers. Humidity and temperature will be tightly controlled and the fire-suppression system is designed so as not to damage electronic items if it goes off.
The vaults that house electronic data also will include electro-magnetic shielding to protect the media from damaging pulses that can be caused by anything from lightening to a nuclear blast.
"When you take records from a stable media like paper and apply them to an unstable medium like electronic files, you have to be much more concerned about safety and security," said Tom Seaver, operations and sales manager at SITECH.
A concern for the safety of all records is being driven by a number of new laws in recent years. The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPAA), the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002, and 2003's Fair and Accurate Credit Transactions Act have all increased the burden of document retention and destruction for organizations.
SITECH is marketing its services to three industries heavily affected by those regulations - health care organizations, financial institutions and research facilities. Companies will be able to track records with barcodes and GPS systems in storage, as well as identifying precisely when other documents are destroyed.
"In some cases, companies are adding on entire wings just to house their records on site," said Seaver. "But when you're storing on site, one disgruntled employee can take you out."
The events of 9/11 also made companies more aware of document and electronic security issues, according to Alspach. "You may remember the cloud of paper in Manhattan on September 11," said Alspach. "There were companies wiped off the face of the earth not because they lost their employees, but because their data wasn't backed up off site and there was just no way to rebuild. That happens every day to companies on smaller scales through acts of espionage, fire, theft, vandalism, nasty competitors, and so on. Records management is just another way of covering yourself."
SITECH is recruiting clients within a 60-mile radius, stretching as far north as Grand Rapids and south to the Indiana border. The company chose Southwest Michigan for its reasonably low real estate prices and because of the state's shift from manufacturing to a service-based economy.
The Richland facility will serve as a pilot project for the start-up venture, which plans to expand nationwide. Alspach said SITECH is currently considering another West Michigan location as well as sites in several other states. The company aims to have 10 facilities open within five years.
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This article appeared in the March 21, 2005 issue of MiBiz, read by upper management executives in West and Southwest Michigan. Print subscriptions are free to qualified individuals who do business in West and Southwest Michigan. For further information about MiBiz Network, visit www.mibiz.com