From public niches to private markets

For 17 years, Reno's MuniMetrix Systems Corp.

has dominated the market in a lucrative niche keeping tabs of the torrent of paper that flows through city halls across the country.

Relying almost exclusively on that niche, the company has posted revenue increases of 30 to 40 percent a year since the mid-1990s.

Now the company seeks to extend its expertise with document managing into the much larger and more competitive markets of the private sector.

The challenge, MuniMetrix President Bruce Rector said the other day, is ensuring that the company maintains its dominance in the municipal market even as it pursues bigger fish elsewhere.

The company's move into private sector markets so far is modest as it makes its pitch largely to potential customers in northern Nevada.

Its municipal business, by comparison, covers the offices of some 2,500 cities, counties and school districts across the nation.

The company got its start with a relatively simple system to help city clerks keep track of documents.

At most city halls, the clerk is charged with knowing the whereabouts of city council resolutions, deeds, meeting agendas and a multitude of other documents.

When Rector and a partner who has since left the company got started, most clerks used systems of 3x5 index cards to track documents.

The MuniMextrix software dubbed "Clerk's Index" allowed those cards to be computerized.

Five years after the company was founded in California, MuniMetrix move to Reno, attracted both by the area's quality of life as well as its tax environment.

Since the company's move, the basic indexing system has been expanded to allow clerks to search through hundreds of documents by keywords.

Other software products from the company help public officials manage contacts with the public and provide document- management services throughout other departments of local governments.

Rector figures the company is successful about 90 percent of the time when it goes after a piece of municipal business, partly because it picks its targets very carefully.

"Our goal is not to have the whole pie," he said.

"Our goal is to have a slice of the pie."

Successful as he's been in the government market, Rector said privately held MuniMetrix watches with some concern as continued municipal budget woes discourage investment in new technology.

And even when times are good, it's a slow-moving market.

"The sales cycle in some cities has been been six, seven or eight years," Rector said.

Which brings the company to the private sector, particularly the parts of the private sector that need careful management of paperwork the financial service industry, health care and legal firms, for instance.

Working in concert with Digital Systems Inc.

of Greenwood Village, Colo., MuniMetrix developed a series of modules that can be customized for paper-handling chores.

One module, for instance, scans and organizes documents.

Another converts scanned images to text.

A third retrieves and displays documents on the Web.

Although the "paperless society" has been promised for decades, Rector believes fast paybacks often, within a year will bring document-management systems to the forefront in many organizations.

The return on investment, he said, flows from a variety of sources: Better use of the time of employees who chase down documents, the savings of money now used to buy file cabinets, the competitive advantages from faster billings that occur with document-management systems.

"Even the cost of employees looking up documents is tremendous," Rector said.

MuniMetrix has beefed up its sales force now composed of four people in a total staff of nine as it increasingly targets the private sector.

"It's not if you're going to go," Rector said.

"It's when you're going to go."