Innovative Enterprise: Private Firm Employs Prisoners

ZAVENTEM, Belgium, February 17, 2015 /PRNewswire/ --

iGuana, an electronic document management and archiving solutions provider in Benelux, is one of the few private, for-profit companies in Belgium to continuously employ and openly promote the use of prison labour. Today, iGuana employs 75 prisoners detained at Central Prison Leuven.

Corporate website: http://iguana-idm.com

"Many companies do not realize that they have the opportunity to work with prisoners," says Stephane Horta, iGuana's CEO. "We have many years of experience working with prisoners and we can testify to the great success of this initiative. Despite the fact that prison labour is often considered a taboo subject, not to be publicly advertised, practical experience and results speak for themselves. We believe that we should leave the justice system to do its work while we focus on ours," he adds.

Working in close cooperation with Cellmade, representing the Prison Labour Board of Belgium, iGuana employs Central Prison Leuven detainees to complete a number of tasks for iGuana ScanFactory, an outsourced document scanning service offered to iGuana clients. Detainee work involves preparing documents for high-speed scanning: removing staples and paper clips, organizing and placing documents in boxes and preparing them for shipment to the ScanFactory facility for further processing. To date, prisoners processed a total of nearly 300 million document pages for iGuana ScanFactory.

"We consider detainees that work for iGuana our employees, all 75 of them. We work closely with Cellmade and Central Prison Leuven to create a healthy and productive work environment where we can train them to perform tasks that are essential to the quality of work and the end product that we deliver to our customers," Mr. Horta explains.

"We are a for-profit business," he emphasizes. "However, we choose not to outsource to lower-cost countries. Instead, we work with Belgian Federal Justice and pay our prisoner employees a salary in accordance with Belgian law. In return, they deliver results, they are disciplined, they enjoy their work, and they are entirely focused on the task at hand. It is a win-win situation for all," he concludes.

About iGuana 

For over 30 years, iGuana (former Allgeier DMS Solutions) has been providing turnkey electronic document management and document archiving solutions. iGuana has many years of in-depth expertise in scanning and indexing huge volumes of documents. The company works with clients in the Healthcare, Banking, Financial, Insurance and Government sectors. At the core of iGuana solutions are the iGuana iDM Document Management Software Suite and the iGuana ScanFactory Document Scanning Services. http://iguana-idm.com

SOURCE iGuana (Former Allgeier DMS Solutions)