Kalispell company offers document management

Haig Ermoian moved to Montana to retire.

“Supposedly, I retired,” he says with a laugh. “But one or two years ago, I realized there was a real need for a service provider for records and repository.”

Ermoian is the owner of Global Archives, a cloud-based data storage company in Kalispell, that is offering services to organizations in need of document management and storage.

Ermoian said that the closest facility that provides similar services is in Missoula.

“Most people were dependent on getting someone from Missoula to come up here,” he said.

Global Archives initially started as a contractor for Xerox and eventually, became a specialist in the digitization of documents.

“We would go to doctors or research clinics; people who had lots of paper and digitized them. We organize a database for companies to find documents more easily,” Ermoian said.

Prior to starting the company, Ermoian graduated from West Point with a degree in engineering and finished with his master’s degree in computer science from the University of California, Berkeley.

After graduating, he went to work for Data Products, a printer manufacturer. He learned the printer business and how to program software and then started Global Archives. The company has been providing imagining and scanning services, secure document repository and paper storage services since 2001.

“Over the years we have provided document management to big corporations and federal and state agencies,” he said. “We also write software to help companies glue all these services together and there aren’t a lot of companies that do that.”

Global Archives' client list includes the likes of Boeing, NASA and AT&T. Locally, they’ve worked with the City of Columbia Falls, Sanders County and several Flathead Valley school districts.

While much of the work may be routine, Ermoian notes that his company has participated in interesting and meaningful work, including the preservation of government and historical documents.

“Our biggest and most interesting project was the Einstein documents,” he said. “Some of those records were handwritten in Hebrew, German, and English.”

The company preserved historical documents for The Albert Einstein Archives at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

Global Archives offers a streamlined process for agencies hoping to employ their services.

“We sit down and talk to clients about how to organize effectively. A lot of places are not well-organized,” Ermoian said.

To show the service is worthwhile, Global Archives completes a workflow analysis to determine how much money companies can save. The savings vary, but we have saved some companies hundreds of thousands of dollars per year, he notes.

“The most rewarding part of the job is seeing the general satisfaction of the user when they see how easy it is to access their documents now,” Ermoian said.

Global Archives can be reached at 406-420-2424. To find out more, visit globalarchives.net.

Reporter Summer Zalesky may be reached at szalesky@dailyinterlake.com.