Annual Service Bureau Directory

By the Editors of Imaging & Document Solutions

More and more service bureaus are adding more and more locations to serve you. That’s why we added geographic location coverage to this year’s service bureau directory.

There’s no question that many single-location firms are serving businesses nationwide, but proximity raises the comfort level for many customers. In a business where paper-to-digital conversion is still a bread-and-butter service, being local can save time and money. Whether it’s a big backfile project or ongoing day-forward conversion, shipping boxes of records back and forth can get expensive. If you’ve opted to outsource — hiring the service bureau to serve the role of an internal department — it’s convenient and desirable to be able to meet your virtual employees face to face.

If you’re outside of a major market area, one could argue that you have little choice but to deal with a service provider from afar; and once you’re dealing with a shipper, what’s the difference if it’s Portland, ME, or Portland, OR? There is the small matter of additional freight charges, but it may be worthwhile to incur a little extra cost if the “special services” you receive fit your needs. In some cases, data-entry-oriented service bureaus scan documents or accept images through a domestic office and then transmit the images overseas to low-labor-rate locations in Mexico, Panama or Bangladesh. In these cases, completed work is returned electronically.

If you’re on your second or third generation of document solutions, your conversion needs may be digital-to-digital, involving migration of images on large-format optical to tape, for example. With the paper out of the way, shipping charges become less of a concern.

Even though this year’s listing is bigger than ever, with nearly 70 firms, consolidation in the service business continues. Bigger players including Lason, F.Y.I. and ImageMax have snatched up independents to spread their coverage nationwide. This can provide advantages for multi-location companies that can negotiate large-scale contracts and rates while still gaining the advantage of local support near each of their corporate locations.

All of the information contained in the tables that follow were self-reported by the service bureaus listed. We consolidated a few categories this year after discovering that many service bureaus now routinely offer color and grayscale scanning alongside traditional bitonal document imaging. Barcode, OMR and ICR, too, have become commonplace services offered as required. Pay close attention to the “other services” category. This is where companies highlighted their service specialties.