It's amazing what color will do

In 1992, Gary Murphy decided to open a business, so he began looking for a suitable building in which to manufacture something. What did he want to manufacture? At the time, he didn't know.

"I found a 20,000-square-foot building where they used to manufacture coffin shrouds," Murphy says. "It had been sitting empty for three or four years since the owner died. I made an offer, and the owners accepted."

Murphy then spent $400,000 on a metalworking machine.

"I didn't know what I was going to do with the machine," he says, "so, I just started developing odd boxes and other things."

From those humble and uncertain beginnings sprung Imaging Business Machines LLC. Since its inception in 1992, IBML has produced more than 300 sophisticated scanners -- in use around the world -- for businesses to use in digitizing documents and reducing mammoth piles of paper.

Upon launching IBML, Murphy had more than 20 years of document imaging experience under his belt, beginning with Control Data in 1966. In the early 1970s, he helped establish a start-up called Input Business Machines, and in the mid-1980s he established Hybrid Systems.

By that time, he had secured three patents in optical character recognition, a stacker method design and a front/back view option that allowed two-sided documents to be read.

Once he decided to manufacture imaging machines, Murphy set out to accomplish two things. First, he wanted to break the black-and-white, or "bi-tonal," barrier; color scanning was viewed at that time as an expensive addition. But Murphy saw a need for color.

"Banks came out with colorful checks," he recalls. "Or someone might use a red ink pen to sign a check. A color scanner can pick those things up while a bi-tonal one cannot."

Murphy's second task was to improve the transport system used to move paper through the scanning machine. Before, scanners used rollers that pinched a portion of the sheet to move it through, creating some space loss on the page. Murphy eliminated pinch rollers by designing a transport track.

This development allowed users to run a variety of document sizes and shapes through the scanners.

The idea and need were there, but Murphy still had to convince the world.

"Most people thought it was rather risky," he says. "At one point I ran out of money. One bank said, `What are you doing? You're losing money, Japan is your customer and Kodak is your competition.'"

Even his salesman had to be convinced.

"It took me two years to convince a salesman that I had worked with before that a color machine was good," he says. "When he finally bought into the idea, it took him another year to convince our first bank customer."

Despite early hurdles, Imaging Business Machines is thriving today. It became profitable in 1996 and generated $15 million in sales last year.

Murphy's ImageTrac machines sell for between $100,000 and $150,000 each and are in service in 17 countries, including Japan, Australia and the United Kingdom. In addition to paperwork-intensive businesses, governments are common customers.

The company currently is developing technology that can read bar codes printed in invisible ink.

"It could be used for legal documents that may not have room on them for bar codes," Murphy says. "Sometimes, documents are used in court cases and need to be properly labeled for everyone to use. Invisible ink could be used to label them and still not get in the way."

The ImageTrac system has been put to some interesting uses; the U.S. State Department uses the technology to make more sophisticated passports to help deter forgery.

With Murphy's system, photos are now imprinted rather than laminated on the front page, which makes illegal alterations a bit more difficult.

The ImageTrac system also has been used in Switzerland to scan Holocaust documents for class action suits against certain banks. Lawyers have been able to access hundreds of thousands of documents via a laptop in their fight to return money stolen from Jews in the 1930s and 1940s.

Reader Comments

• More News Headlines
• Popular News Stories