Choose the Right Records Storage System And Save Money
Despite everyone's best intentions the paperless office has never quite materialised and as people look for ways to squeeze every square foot of office space, one answer just may lie in the way you store your records.
If you were to add up the floor space that your filing system is taking up and calculate the portion of rent devoted to storing records, your finance director would be probably be ordering a skip and planning a shredding campaign for the next few weeks.
Unfortunately many organisations still rely on the trust old grey filing cabinet and have banks of them scattered around every office taking up valuable space. If you consider that you could immediately free up more than 50% of the storage floor space just by replacing the filing cabinets with floor to ceiling storage walls, you can begin to see the potential that efficient record storage can offer – even in smaller offices.
However if you are looking to condense a large number of filing cabinets with a mobile shelving system you could potentially improve the space usage by over 300%.
But before you start taking your frustrations out on your filing cabinets it is vital that you also take into consideration both what is being stored and how the storage systems are being used.
All too often companies find that their storage facility has grown organically and as a result is becoming less and less efficient or have created a system which has been designed to simply store as many records as physically possible.
Having installed thousands of solutions in a diverse range of industries, we have found that accessibility is the most important consideration and we need to balance this with the available space and the desired storage capacity.
If we look at accessibility, the key drivers will be the number of people accessing the files and whether the solutions is for live file, secondary storage or deep archive information.
Only by developing a process for categorising records and the likely demands and of course your legal requirements can you truly begin to enjoy significant savings on your record storage.
When it comes to the storage of large amounts of records there a number of products available however 90% of the solutions tend to be Mobile Shelving Systems, Static Systems or Slide-a- Sides.
Mobile Shelving Systems continue to be extremely popular and offer the
tremendous benefit of transforming the capacity of a static system however you do have to sacrifice an element of accessibility. In a recent project we were asked to advise on a mobile shelving system which had been installed in a busy filing room and the system was creating serious issues because records could not be retrieved or filed at the speed required. The mobile shelving system was therefore hindering the organisation as opposed to facilitating. After fully examining the pros and cons of all the alternatives, we recommended that the system was modified to provide static shelving.
However the world of mobile shelving has developed at an incredible pace and they now feature accessories to enable all sorts of materials to be stored such as small components, large format prints and architects drawings.
Of course where static shelving solution has a comparatively smaller potential capacity, there is very little substitute when the system has a high usage by numerous personnel at any one time.
The capacity of static shelving can also be enhanced where you have access to additional height which allows you to create a tiered system that can double or treble your capacity with virtually no additional floor space.
More and more clients are now considering our Slide a Side shelving systems which allow clients to store additional files similar to the mobile shelving solution but which are accessed by sliding the entire shelving unit to the side.
In a recent project, we were presented with a storage area of 12m x 2.4m and to demonstrate the range of the 3 potential solutions to the client, we presented the full capability and performance of each.
Unsurprisingly the static shelving offered the least storage capacity at just 158 linear metres, however it was the lowest priced of the 3 options and provided permanent access to all the files.
The Mobile System provided the maximum capacity with up to 290 linear metres just pipping the Slide-a-Side which offered an impressive 285 linear metres.
However the mobile shelving system only offered access to just 7% of the files at any one time as opposed to the impressive 55% offered by the Slide-a-Side, making it the optimum choice for that particular project.
Like most companies today you will be looking at every way in which you can cut costs in the office. To ensure your records are not taking valuable floor space, start by counting the number of filing cabinets you have and then start planning your space more effectively. Better still give us a call. |
