Smart Sort provides a path to defensible disposition whitepaper

Bring order to chaos; Ensure compliance and cut costs

Smart sort provides a path to defensible disposition

Sort records in a way that not only supports defensible destruction but also allows you to more efficiently search for them and find what you need, whenever you may need it

Why is defensible disposition so hard to achieve?

The cost and potential risk of keeping information past retention requirements is high. You need to destroy paper records as they meet retention requirements, but, unfortunately, this is not as simple as it sounds.

Your inventory is most likely stored by policy, patient, or loan number — or some other unique identifier — each with a different destruction eligibility date. This means you are holding on to tens of thousands of paper records simply because you haven’t found a cost-effective way to reorganise comingled files so that you can confidently make decisions about disposition. As a result, your records could sit in file rooms or on storage shelves in perpetuity.

Until now.

With Iron Mountain Smart Sort, you can accelerate the destruction of paper records and enable a more compliant, efficient, and defensible records management program.

Our trained records management team will use input from your organisation’s database and records retention schedule to survey your inventory and identify destruction eligibility at the file level. Then we’ll reorganise your records according to destruction eligibility year so that you can confidently destroy information according to policy.

What makes smart sort defensible?

To answer this question, let’s start by outlining the Smart Sort process.

• You share your organisation’s records retention schedule and database with Iron Mountain. With this information, all actions can be defended by the official policy.
• Following compliant processes, we retrieve your records inventory, which is stored in cartons or on open shelves. Using a native Iron Mountain app on a mobile device, we capture each record’s unique file ID via a barcode scan or a manual entry of the file ID.
• The captured information is matched with the file-level listing in your database, along with the destruction eligibility date from your records retention schedule.
• We isolate and defensibly destroy all records that have met retention requirements.
• For records that have not met retention requirements, we will organise them by like destruction dates and assign them to a carton or shelf with records that share the same destruction eligibility year.
• Records with high retrieval needs can be scanned and delivered digitally.

Combining your organisation’s records retention schedule and databases with the power of our technology, Iron Mountain Smart Sort puts your records in order by identifying when they are eligible for destruction, now or in the future. This solution provides a consistent, programmatic, and objective process to organize your records.

You now have a repeatable, rule-based, and technology enabled process that removes subjectivity from decisions about records retention. Any updates made to your retention schedule and records database, including files with event dates governing retention that change rare difficult to predict, are included going forward. Because Smart Sort hinges on integrating these into the process, your most current information is always used to determine destruction eligibility.

Is smart sort right for our organisation?

Do you find it hard to:

• Manage files which must be retained on an event-date basis?
• Locate files when you need them?
• Determine which files are eligible for destruction?
• Regulate spend due to over retention of files?
• Manage records inherited through an M&A?
• Destroy what you don't need when you're moving locations or closing offices?
• Do this yourself because it costs a lot and resources are limited?
• Develop a cost-effective and defensible solution to fix it permanently?