It's time to give up your onsite file room

Corporate file rooms, or onsite locations for storing hard-copy records, are quickly becoming obsolete. Outsourcing file storage to a centralised, third-party service provider will allow you to redirect your limited resources toward generating additional revenue.

The corporate file room, an onsite location for storing hard-copy records, is quite a challenge to manage. Single onsite file rooms — or worse, several scattered locations — complicate and raise the cost of records and information management (RIM). Dispersed records managed by different teams are very difficult to track for regulatory, legal and business requirements. Most organisations are transitioning to electronic records, while retaining their hard-copy records for the sake of compliance, which slows digital transformation.

An expensive, time-consuming liability

Local onsite records storage doesn't drive revenue; instead, it consumes experienced personnel, time and valuable real estate. These resources could be redirected to other corporate projects that would favourably increase the bottom line. Furthermore, as business changes, file rooms are not easily scalable. As a result, many organisations are gradually digitising some of their hard-copy records and incorporating them into their enterprise content management (ECM) system — a slow, expensive and error-prone process if done in-house.

In today's modern business world where employees receive and generate more records yearly, the return on investment (ROI) of storing all paper records onsite is almost always negative when compared with other solutions.

Organisations faced a similar challenge with corporate canteens. Many years ago, larger organisations installed onsite canteens for their employees' convenience and to keep them in the office to reduce tardiness after lunch. Even though food service was not a core competency, the canteens were managed and staffed by the organisations' employees, which was very expensive. Onsite canteens also had opportunity costs in staff and real estate that could have been devoted to other business priorities. Today, most organisations sensibly outsource canteen services to the food experts or do not offer onsite canteens at all.

Consider whether your staff, especially in a dispersed environment, can continue to adequately manage active records onsite and respond to regulatory or eDisclosure requests in a timely fashion given all your business priorities. Your onsite records storage, like company-managed canteens, should likely be replaced with a modern and cost-effective solution.

The benefits of outsourcing file storage

In many cases, RIM staff are reluctant to relinquish onsite systems and procedures. They worry about chain of command — if the records are not in their direct physical control, how can they be sure the records are secure and properly managed? Additionally, if hard-copy records are housed remotely, can specific records be quickly retrieved? In reality, concerns about adopting a new RIM process can be allayed by working with a reputable RIM partner that provides proven outsourced file-room capabilities.

An offsite file-room solution managed by RIM professionals can:

• Free up the floor space currently occupied by your organisation's records storage rooms.
• Reduce the demands on your current staff to support file-room management.
• Centralise all file rooms for more efficient, lower-cost and more accurate RIM.
• Maintain quick access to information though Image on Demand (IOD) technology.
• Efficiently digitise through IOD only those active or semi-active hard-copy records that would benefit the company by being instantly available to search and review in an ECM system.
• Maintain your file-room workflow process by having your RIM partner replicate it offsite.
• Eliminate file-storage capital expenditure and convert much of your RIM file storage to an operational expenditure.
• Ensure you only pay for what you consume by scaling your records storage needs on-demand.

A centralised, offsite file room managed on your behalf by a trusted third-party records storage service provider can help you redirect your limited resources toward generating additional revenue. You can store all files offsite while retaining access to active records – retrievable within hours – and archive inactive files. This helps you keep costs down while also ensuring you can respond to information requests quickly. File Room Storage Solutions will decrease cost, increase access, and ensure more reliable and accurate management of your records while giving you the best option for storing, securing and retrieving your records.