Iron Mountain, a Recent Addition with Big Plans

Iron Mountain is a company that many of our readers may already be familiar with. For the most part, the company is best known as a document management and storage provider. While this is still true, over the last few years Iron Mountain has evolved into a broader information management provider. Within one of its main businesses, document management, Iron Mountain has traditionally been an imaging provider and for AP this would have meant back-end imaging of invoices. Over the last couple of years, however, the company has shifted its focus to more front-end business process capabilities. As such, about a year ago Iron Mountain entered the AP space (read about it here) and is now leveraging its storage network, its document management capabilities and key partner relationships to deliver a robust solution to automate AP.

Before getting in to that, I want to provide a better picture of Iron Mountain. The company has about 60 years of expertise, boasts some 150,000 customers including 94% of the F1000 and, had $3 billion in revenues last year. This makes them one of larger and more established providers to have entered this space recently.

Iron Mountain’s offering caters to multiple requirements ranging from the very basic to higher value activities as detailed below:

1. At the lower-end covering the more basic needs, Iron Mountain offers back-end imaging, enabling AP (post process) to store invoices electronically.
2. The next level for AP groups is front-end imaging. Here, Iron Mountain receives its customer’s invoices (via mail, email, fax or PDF) and scans them and delivers them to the customer for further processing.
3. In addition to the above, Iron Mountain can add data indexing and extraction, which converts data into a digital format. This process is done using a leading OCR product but Iron Mountain also conducts manual review of the captured data to ensure 100% accuracy.
4. The next step is where Corcentric’s COR 360 product comes into play by providing a complete cloud-based AP workflow. COR 360 is a multi-tenant SaaS (software-as-a-service) solution. This allows customers to develop business rules to automate invoice processing including routing and approvals. The solution also provides additional capabilities such as validation against vendor master, PO matching, straight-through processing, reporting, etc.
5. Next, as surprising as it may be, Iron Mountain offers an eInvoicing solution and they have also developed a supplier network (a many-to-many network). The solution has zero restrictions on file formats for eInvoices, no set-up fees for either buyer or supplier (and no transaction fees for suppliers). Included as part of this solution is a supplier enrollment service that is managed by Iron Mountain.
6. Finally, in partnership with a company called C2FO, Iron Mountain will deliver a unique working capital / cash management solution that takes dynamic discounting to the next level.  C2FO is a marketplace that allows buyers and suppliers to optimize their working capital positions in a live auction platform. The platform allows vendors to opt-in and offer discounts in live auction events to receive payments early.  By making this capability completely optional, collaborative and variable from both the supplier and buyer sides, the potential to generate savings is significant.

So, as you can see, Iron Mountain is going full force in the AP space with a wide range of solutions and services to meet various requirements. For being in the space for only one year, the company has had great success with approximately 24 customers utilizing one or more of the above mentioned offerings. They are certainly one to watch over the coming years, especially do the significant resources they have access to and the large customer base.