Unfolding the storage practices for documents in your company can be a real exercise that will open your eyes. In most cases, a closer look will reveal inefficiencies that will drive up your disk storage costs.
While this is obviously bad news, it has a silver lining. If you rethink and revise your storage approach, you have the opportunity to create something more efficient than ever.
This post provides tips on how to achieve these savings.
How Much Can You Save?
Before you revise your retention practices, you may be wondering if it's worth the effort.
To get an idea of how much you can win, you need to look at several factors.
Here are some questions to ask:
- How much does a square foot of office storage space cost? This should take into account leasing costs, taxes and maintenance fees.
- How much square feet of memory are you using today?
- How much total money do you spend on external storage and per box? This should take into account the monthly or annual storage fee, ongoing access and redemption fees, as well as the one-time entry, exit and secure destruction fees.
- How many boxes are currently in your area? Space?
With this data, you can easily calculate what a five, ten, or 25 percent reduction in disk space requirements would mean for your bottom line. The tips described in this article usually lead to savings in this area.
Four ways to reduce inventory costs
- Deleting Unrecorded Material
With the thousands of customers we worked with we found that 30 to 70 percent of the on-site file storage is made up of non-recorded materials. This includes duplicate copies, replaced drafts and versions, and outdated reference documents. This gives you an idea of how much you could save if documents that were not recorded and were not required were regularly deleted.
- Planning and Scheduling Records
This is about ensuring that you only save your records for as long as the law requires. A well-researched record keeping schedule is essential. The schedule sets out the minimum retention periods required to meet legal and regulatory requirements. By disposing of records as soon as the minimum storage conditions are met, you can avoid a lot of unnecessary storage costs.
- Inactive or on-site storage
Before the recordings reach the end of their prescribed retention period, they often go through an "inactive phase" in which they are used for the current Business are no longer needed. Or they rarely see use. Moving these documents to cheaper external or local storage spaces can free up expensive office space for revenue-generating activities. To achieve this, life cycle controls and audits should be set up to ensure that rarely used documents are not kept for a premium.
- In-Office File Design
A lot of money can be saved if you rethink your file and storage facilities and use your existing space. By combining innovations such as final register folders, color-coded labels, side shelves and mobile shelves, a professionally designed storage solution can improve space utilization by more than 300 percent! That means you can store three times as many records on the same footprint or on the same volume of records on just a third of the footprint.
The key with all these tips is to store less and smarter!
Next steps
