Reprinted from the Kansas City Star From: Your Business - A guide to small business money management. IT'S ALL IN THE DETAILS Info-Data serves clients by organizing complex material into usable databases. By Lorraine Gehring Special to The Star Most folks dislike detail-oriented work. They see a stack of forms to input or a box of index cards to organize and they cringe. But Gary Abernathy and Bill Rice smile. Collecting and organizing other companies' details has helped their company, Info-Data Services, Inc., grow into one of the larger data and information capture companies in the Midwest. Info-Data's growth is due in large part to its ability to customize its approach for each customer. The North Kansas City, Mo., company has a core staff of about 20 in-house data entry keyers. But it also has a part-time staff that allows it to quickly add trained keyers as needed. And, it uses new technologies to convert hard-copy data into usable, searchable databases. Another plus is that Info-Data can build databases for its customers regardless of how it receives the raw data. For example, Boomtown Casino in Harvey, La., sent Info-Data more than 160,000 entry forms from nine different promotional contests. Some of the forms were printed in color, some on cards, others on paper. Some came sorted and boxed, some came loose in plastic bags. In all, 70 boxes arrived at Info-Data to be converted into a marketing database. Boomtown's database coordinator, Michelle Weiler, knew that the raw data could be a valuable marketing tool - if she could get it in a usable, electronic form. After investigating New Orleans area companies, Weiler searched the Internet and found Info-Data. The company bid on and won the job. Boomtown was so pleased with the database that it hired Info-Data to create another, this one containing nearly 300,000 records. Info-Data employs several methods to get raw data into manageable form. It uses data entry keyers to input printed and written data. Workers also scan forms and use optical character recognition technologies to convert printed information into electronic form. The company even scans hard-copy data and then sends the images to keyers, who, using a split screen, read the data from one side and type it in on the other. Info-Data also uses newer approaches, including one that creates electronic visual pages that are fully searchable. Springer-Verlag, a publisher of scientific books, has hired Info-Data to scan and convert more than 7,000 publications so they will be searchable on the Internet in several formats. The Springer-Verlag project illustrates the direction that Abernathy, Info-Data's president and owner, is taking the company. Such projects involve processing information, not data. Springer-Verlag's scientific books, for example, already contain information in a form that can be used. Info-Data is converting that information from one medium into another. Although the company is getting more involved in integrating different technologies these days, most of its projects are still done using data entry keyers. The company employes 50 to 60 data entry keyers in the Kansas City area, about 20 in its main office and 30 to 40 who work at home. Rice, the company's vice president and general manager, said the home-based keyers were permanent, part-time employees. As employees who work only on Info-Data projects, he said, the home keyers can be relied on to meet deadlines. The North Kansas City and Des Moines offices each have all the electronic information that the other has, Rice said. That ensures that customer data will be protected from disasters. If a fire or tornado hits one office, the company's electronic records won't be lost. In the late 1980's Abernathy's company merged with another data processing company, Saztec, and went public. In 1993, when Saztec decided to get out of the data entry business, it sold its data entry division to Osborn's Info-Data. In 1999, Osborn hired Abernathy as chief operating officer with the agreement that if the company met certain milestones, Abernathy would have a chance to buy it. Last August, Abernathy took control.