Smart Sort provides a path to defensible disposition

Hello and welcome to Iron Mountain’s Smart Sort Centre of Excellence. My name is Andrew Kern and I’m the Creator of Iron Mountain’s Smart Sort solution. Today, we’re in Chicago, Illinois, at one of our processing centres, where we’ll take you on a brief tour and show you our Smart Sort process in action. Before I do, let me set the stage with a bit of background.

Cleaning up legacy records is extremely difficult when files are stored in boxes or on shelves with mixed record types and various destruction eligibility dates. This leads to over-retention, increased cost, and unnecessary risk, preventing you from meeting your business objectives and digital transformation goals.

At Iron Mountain, we understand our customers’ need to sort and reorganise their records to improve file-level visibility, enabling them to make simple and defensible decisions about what to do with their inventory.

And that’s why we’ve developed Smart Sort. Let me show you how it works.

• To begin, you decide what boxes of records need to be sorted. These records may currently be stored at Iron Mountain, with a different vendor, or come from your offices or records centre—it doesn’t matter—they will be securely transported for processing to a facility such as this.
• Once the boxes are staged, we start the Smart Sort process by capturing the unique file ID found on the outside of the file. We do that with a scan of a barcode or by hand keying in the file ID.
• Once the file ID is captured, using data extracted from your core business application and records retention schedule, Smart Sort tells us instantly—in real time—the outcome for that file, and we sort and re-box accordingly.
• Let me give you a few examples. Is it a destruction eligible file? Or does it need to be kept until a future year? Is it a file that needs to be turned over for a divestiture or legal hold? Does it need to be digitised now or digitised in the future? You decide how you want your files sorted and Smart Sort does the work.
• When the box is full, we close it and record it as complete in our system. The new box and its corresponding files are updated and available on Iron Mountain ReQuest Web, our online hub. This ensures that you have full file-level visibility and can easily make future disposition decisions.
• This box is now ready to be staged and transported for secure storage or digitisation.
• For files that have met retention requirements and can be defensibly destroyed, we follow the same process, but the boxes are wrapped in black and clearly labeled for destruction.

As you can see, Smart Sort eliminates the traditional manual effort of weeding through thousands of files and replaces it with an automated, defensible, technology-based solution. Regardless of your industry, the outcome is exactly what you need: reduce risk and costs by securely destroying records that you no longer need to keep – with a system in place to enable future decision-making about your inventory.

Just think of Smart Sort as unmingling your commingled files.

Thank you for watching. To learn more about Smart Sort please reach out to your Iron Mountain representative or visit ironmountain.com/smartsort.