One on the aisle - movable - SpaceSaver Storage Systems manufactures mobile storage systems - Company Profile

Nation's Business, Oct, 1992 by Michael Barrier

In an increasingly crowded world, companies that offer their customers ways to use space more efficiently stand to do very well. Theodore W. Batterman's company is one of them; it is called Spacesaver, and it does exactly what its name implies.

Spacesaver, a Fort Atkinson, Wis., firm, makes what it calls "high-density mobile-storage systems"--an intimidating name for a highly practical product. Through the use of Spacesaver's systems, its customers can save almost all the space taken up by the aisles between rows of bookshelves, filing cabinets, or other kinds of storage units.

With a Spacesaver system, anyone who needs an aisle can make one appear, when and where it's needed, by grasping a handle or pressing a button, depending on whether the system is manually or electronically operated. The storage units, mounted on wheeled carriages, move on tracks to open up the needed space.

Because only one movable aisle is needed for perhaps a dozen rows of shelves, many more shelves can fit into the same space; or the space saved can be given over to other uses. Spacesaver's systems are not more expensive than conventional storage, Batterman says, "if you look at the space that's required in relation to the cost per inch of filing space."

That argument has been persuasive enough that Spacesaver, which works mainly through 46 affiliated contractors, has installed more than 30,000 systems, each one custom-designed to fit into a particular space. That customization is essential, Batterman says, to avoid problems like those afflicting the new British Library in London, where a Dutch-made system has actually flung books off the shelves.

Spacesaver's customers include hospitals, universities, government agencies, and large corporations--organizations that generate lots of paper and have trouble figuring out how to store it. Spacesaver got its biggest contract ever last year, when the National Archives chose its storage systems for what will be the largest archival facility in the world, in College Park, Md.

"The industry really started in Europe," Batterman says, spurred there by a lack of space and high storage costs. The first American systems were imported in the late '60s.

Batterman, a native of Illinois, was then a vice president of an automotive-equipment manufacturer in Beloit, Wis. In 1972, he bought the company that he later renamed Spacesaver. Until then, it was primarily a small, family-owned manufacturer of cabinets for schoolrooms. In 1970, though, it had built a manually operated mobile-storage system for an Appleton, Wis., architect who was intrigued by the European systems. It was that product that attracted Batterman's attention. Before buying the company, he traveled to Europe "to see what the future could be." What he saw convinced him that the concept had tremendous potential. "There were people who said that the system would never be usable in a regular working environment, but only in a basement or some such place," he says. "We didn't believe that."

In fact, he says, efficiency picks up with a mobile system. For one thing, when an electronic system is controlled from a computer console, "people don't have to look for the aisle, because the aisle will open for them."

Spacesaver has identified 17 broad markets for its systems, Batterman says, ranging from law offices and libraries to hospitals and restaurants (where Spacesaver has installed systems for cold storage). "We still have a job to do in educating different industries," he says. "We run into people who say, I've never heard of that before.' "

But once Spacesaver gets a foothold, Batterman says, "there's a real relationship with the customer that builds." In hospitals, for example, Spacesaver's systems were first used mainly for medical records and X-rays; over the years, Batterman says, their use has spread to other departments.

For the most part, Spacesaver has remained tightly focused on its core product, although for a while Batterman tried to make products of a superficially similar kind: the vertical carousels used in manufacturing plants. Those products turned out to be much more complicated to sell than Batterman expected, because of the software requirements--"everyone wanted something different"--so he sold that line.

Spacesaver has in the last few years diversified again, but only by making its own steel shelving, in a highly automated, $7.5 million plant. "More and more of the customers are going toward the shelving we manufacture," Batterman says, because it is designed for use on the carriages and tracks that make up the mobile system itself.

Spacesaver will adapt its system to accommodate a customer's existing shelves or cabinets, though; as Batterman says, "they don't have to throw them away."

Batterman, who will turn 65 in November, almost died four years ago from a burst appendix; that crisis prompted him to hire a new president and two new vice presidents from outside. "The company is going through a transition from a small company to a medium-size company," Batterman says--he won't reveal sales figures, but the total number of employees is now close to 300--and he sought out a succession team that had experience with larger operations.