Iron Mountain Smart Sort clears the way for a corporate divestiture
Learn how a major insurance company took advantage of smart sort to quickly identify the policy files required to fulfill the terms of the divestiture.
In a corporate divestiture, careful discovery and management of the associated records — determining which files to turn over to the buyer and which ones should remain with the seller — can be a complex undertaking potentially requiring a review of thousands of records (if not more) on a tight deadline and in strict compliance with all regulatory, privacy and legal requirements.
Traditionally, this task was accomplished manually by reviewers and analysts going through individual boxes of files. More recently, records have undergone scanning and digital text extraction.
Regardless of the method, it’s a time-consuming and costly process that becomes even more challenging when (as is often the case) files are spread out across multiple filerooms and record centres (both on premises and offsite) with multiple record types commingled in the same storage box.
To address this challenge, Iron Mountain offers Smart Sort — a workflow solution enabling you to locate, sort, organise and manage a large number of records within demanding time constraints.
How Smart Sort works
Using basic information (e.g., policy numbers) from an organisation’s core business applications, Smart Sort matches that information with a scan or keyed entry of the file ID. The result is an up-to-date file-level listing that maps the location of all files to the individual box level so that decisions can automatically be made on how each file should be managed to meet immediate business requirements.
Let’s look at how Smart Sort was used to support a complex divestiture:
How a major insurance company took advantage of Smart Sort
Situation
A major U.S. insurance company was divesting part of its business to two new owners and needed to locate and turn over 1.9 million specific insurance policies to two new owners within 12 months.
Challenge
The divesting company quickly realised that its records management processes would make it difficult to complete the discovery and records turnover within the 12-month time period. For example, insurance policies are often inventoried in diverse ways and commingled with other record types. Also, the lack of internal resources and efficient processes for sorting and transferring records made it impossible to accomplish in the required timeframe.
Smart Sort In Action
A team of Iron Mountain Records Management professionals went to work. By taking full advantage of Smart Sort, combined with relevant information pulled from the company’s core business applications, they were able to quickly:
- Provide information to make the decisions to relinquish or retain each file
- Identify the specific policy files impacted by the divestiture
- Sort and assign all records to their new owner
- Tag all records with the status of active or inactive
- Create an up-to-date, file-level listing, mapping the location of all files down to the individual box level
Benefits of using Smart Sort
Immediate benefits
Manageable, automated system
Long-term benefits
Looking beyond the divestiture, the up-to-date, file-level listing created by Smart Sort makes it possible for the company to further streamline its records management, reduce costs and make retention and destruction decisions easier and more compliant.
Smart Sort enables the divesting company to:
- Speed up the process of locating records
- Increase record find rates
- Make defensible decisions on which records can be destroyed and which need to be retained
- Eliminate the problem of “commingled records” enabling future box-level destruction decisions
- Reduce the space devoted to records storage, lowering costs and facilitating office reconfiguration
- More easily meet legal and regulatory retention and compliance requirements
Featured services & solutions
Why choose Smart Sort
Smart Sort is a great choice for any process where there is a need to quickly and accurately sort and organise a large number of records such as:
• Acquisitions
• Divestitures
• Mergers
• Legal actions
• Regulatory filings
• Digital transformation initiatives
• Relocation / reconfiguration of existing facilities
• Reducing records storage