Without a trace

Entrepreneur, Feb, 1999 by Jill Amadio

Keep your company's secrets confidential: Shred 'em before they've read 'em!

Have you ever wondered if someone was snooping through your trash to find valuable company information? One of the best means of protecting your company secrets from prying eyes is to destroy the documents containing them, such as customer lists, computer passwords, contracts, reworked profit and loss statements, invoices and sales reports. The easiest way to do that is to use a shredder.

"Shredding is the fastest and most secure way to keep confidential documents from circulating into the wrong hands," says William Golde, president of MBM Corp., a paper shredder distributor in North Charleston, South Carolina. "While accounting firms, financial institutions, medical facilities and insurance companies have always considered themselves at high risk for information theft, any company with competitors and clients shares the same hazard. If you don't shred sensitive documents, you could put your organization in jeopardy."

There is an astounding variety of shredders on the market, from simple metal bars that fit over small trash cans to gigantic industrial machines that occupy entire rooms and shred 600 tons of paper per month.

"Look for a model that has safety features such as auto-reverse to clear jams and a bag-full alarm to prevent overfilling the container," recommends Curtis W. Hallowell, product manager for Cummins-Allison Corp. in Mt. Prospect, Illinois. "One of our bestsellers is Model 155, priced at $1,625. It features a high-security cut for handling government materials and highly sensitive legal and financial papers. The smaller you shred documents, the more difficult it is to reconstruct them."

Features to look for regardless of size include an extra flap for inserting waste paper that needs no shredding, casters so you can roll the shredder around the office, auto reverse to clear paper jams, a safety flap that automatically turns off the machine when the flap is closed, and the option of choosing a strip, cross or high-security cutting head.

Models in the $600 to $800 range can chew up paper at a rate of 20 to 30 feet per minute, as well as munch on staples and paper clips that might be left on. These shredders have built-in baskets to catch the shredded material, and some companies sell fitted plastic liner bags that can be removed and kept if you use shredded paper as packing material.

Some models have wide enough shredder openings to accept the miles of computer printouts you're disposing of, while others have powerful motors and conveyor belts for volume processing. You can even buy shredders that have locks on their bins and specially designed curved throats to prevent anyone from reaching in and grabbing the paper strips so they can reconstruct them.

"Noise can be a factor, too, when choosing a shredder," says John Bartel, president of Ameri-Shred Corp. in Monroeville, Pennsylvania. "Shredders mounted on rubber insulators soak up vibration and make sure air circulation is drawn up from the bottom, rather than having air vents in the side of the shredder, which releases motor noise."

Finally, choose a shredder that will last. "The key to selecting a model that will give you eight to 10 years of service is to determine the volume of paper you want to shred per [use]. Also, because it has moving parts, a shredder's warranty is very important," says Bartel.

According to many manufacturers, the number-one mistake business owners make when purchasing a shredder is underestimating their needs and buying a shredder that's too small. Another is not doing enough comparison shopping.

While our chart lists just a few of the shredders available, all the manufacturers listed have complete lines of shredders, from light volume to heavy duty. Your best bet for researching their offerings is to call the telephone numbers listed and ask for a catalog, or log on to their Web sites. You'll be surprised at the range available, and many larger models can be leased. Ameri-Shred Corp., for example, has tire shredders, corrugated box shredders and [TABULAR DATA OMITTED] plastic shredders as well as small and large paper shredders.

One company, Security Engineered Machinery of Westboro, Massachusetts, includes CD-ROM erasure in its catalog of data disintegrators, which destroys disks, credit cards, circuit boards, holograms, microfilm passports, slides, videotapes and X-ray film.

Here's a shredder shopper's glossary of terms:

Auto start/stop: A function that automatically shuts off the machine when it senses no more paper is forthcoming.

Batch feeding: Inserting multiple sheets of paper into the shredder.

Capacity: The number of sheets that can be fed into the shredder at one time.

Cross cut: Cuts paper two ways into l/4-x-1 1/2-inch strips for better security and to reduce the bulk of material, allowing the shredder bag to hold four to five times more than strip cut paper.

Shred size: The width of the shredded paper.

Stream or bulk feeding: For continuous computer printouts. Once the first page is fed into the shredder, the attached pages automatically follow.