Moore, Kinko's offer document management outsourcing
If Moore (Lake Forest, IL,
http://www.moore.com) and
Kinko's (Ventura, CA,
http://www.kinkos.com) have their way, the one place your documents won't reside is on your own server. They'll reside somewhere outside your company on servers operated and managed by one of the two service/printing giants.
Moore is offering to manage all of your business documents--paper and electronic--as well as the services that support the documents and programs throughout their life cycle. It claims that its professional management of business communications will enable companies to get to market more quickly, reduce redundancy and obsolescence costs, streamline operations and shift under-performing assets in non-core areas to variable costs.
Kinko's is moving into document management outsourcing in a different way--through the acquisition of Electronic Demand Publishing (EDP, Rochester, NY, http://www.edp.com), a global document management and manufacturing company. The acquisition is the first in Kinko's 27-year history.
EDP specializes in the maintenance, security, manufacturing and distribution of corporate intellectual property, offering integrated turn-key process and strategy for managing documents through long-term contracts or facility management arrangements. Using state-of-the-art on-demand digital production techniques, EDP provides production, assembly, inventory control, fulfillment and tracking of tens of thousands of documents.
According to both firms, corporations using their services could save substantially, by improving the efficiency of document management and internal and external business communications and by freeing up capital that would otherwise be tied up in document management hardware and software.
The development seems to fit with a growing interest in document management outsourcing, as seen in recent developments at AT&T and the IRS. Might outsourcing someday seriously challenge in-house document management? Moore and Kinko's are betting that it will.