Vanguard Systems Buys Elite Document Solutions

Published: February 5, 2007

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

Vanguard Systems, a supplier of document management, workflow, and related storage applications for the i5/OS and OS/400 platform, continues to grow through acquisitions, and last week it bought one of its partners, Elite Document Systems.

Vanguard sells an electronic document management solution called IMS/21, which runs on i5/OS and OS/400. IMS/21 is commonly used in insurance, healthcare, financial services, and distribution companies that also rely heavily on documents to do their business. The IMS/21 software keeps electronic versions of all of the fax, invoice, statement, and other reports that i5/OS and OS/400 applications generate; it allows the scanning in of paper documents, and makes the whole shebang searchable.

Elite Document Solutions provides electronic document management software for the i5/OS and OS/400 platform, one of many companies providing such functionality. The company's flagship product, EliteForms, creates forms and PDFs natively on the i5/OS and OS/400 platform without using IBM's Advanced Function Printing protocol.

Last August, Vanguard merged with the formerly independent Document Imaging Solutions, a company that sold a records management tool called e-DMS/Workflow, which runs on Windows servers. The key to enterprise content management (ECM) is creating customized records management extensions to software--in this case the e-DMS/Workflow product--that are tailored for specific industries, and DIS had created such extensions to its software for the following: electronics, aerospace, and heavy manufacturing; automotive distribution; chemical and metals manufacturing; engineering services; financial services; healthcare; insurance; retail, utilities; education; and government.

With the Vanguard acquisition of DIS, both companies retained their names and brands and stayed in their respective locations of Media, Pennsylvania, and Dayton, Ohio. With the Vanguard acquisition of Elite Document Solutions, all members of the Elite staff will remain part of the combined company and the company name and product names will all be retained for the "foreseeable future," according to a statement put out by Vanguard. Elite's employees will continue to work from the Lake Forest, California, location as well.

Vanguard and Elite have been partners for years, and their respective IMS/21 and EliteForms software are already integrated. The companies are now going to work on integrating signature capture, email, and fax functionality of the two programs. Exactly how the DIS software will be rolled into the combined solutions is unclear.

"We now offer a complete lineup of products from the creation of electronic forms, integrated fax, document and content management, records management, scanning solutions, storage solutions, and workflow," said Dave Engberg, Vanguard's president and chief executive officer in the statement. "We can now provide our customers with a solution for any document creation, storage or regulatory control problem they may have."

Both Vanguard Systems and Elite Document Solutions are privately held companies, and the financial details of the acquisition were not disclosed.

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