"What I am looking for is information from someone who has met the challenge somewhere in their career where they had to make a decision about whether to develop their own records centers, or should we consolidate to one vendor and outsource the storage of our business records? Or....if this was an option in your organization which route would you choose and why?"

Vickie:

I had the opportunity to insource our offsite storage when I was working for CompUSA in Dallas about 5 years ago.  The key point to us making the decision to move forward with insourcing was the fact we had property we were already paying for that was not being used.  The building was actually used for customer service so it was originally filled with cubicles and offices.  Our Facilities department was able to break down all of the cubicles and sell them.  We then racked-out the entire building (about 75,000 sq. ft.), purchased PCs and the O'Neil software, leased a van, and gradually pulled our boxes out from the offsite vendor, who shall remain nameless.

One caveat to this is that CompUSA is out of business.  Fortunately, this project did not cause the company to go under.  Quite the opposite.  Since there were minimal incremental costs involved, insourcing was going to save the company about $500,000 over 3-4 years.  Additiuonal benefits included better customer service and a complete understanding of our inventory as we went through many of the boxes that didn't have descriptions and inventoried them.

I doubt we would of done this without the existing available space.  Adding the cost of warehouse space would have driven our ROI down to the point where it wouldn't have been worth the work.  And there was a lot of physical work involved as we transported the boxes from the vendor ourselves.  Aaah the good old days of sweating in the hot Dallas summer heat!

Thanks, Steve

Stephen A. Smith, MLIS, CRM, CDIA+
Records Manager
QVC, Inc. Internal Audit
O:      484.701.1559
F:      484.701.1021
C:      484.905.2517
E:      [log in to unmask]
A:      Studio Park, 1200 Wilson Dr., MC207, West Chester, PA, 19380-4262

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