I've always wanted to sell t-shirts emblazoned with "Image it all. Let God
sort it out." As others have noted, converting a hard copy warehouse to
electronic storage is generally flat stupid. You will never get the ROI
back unless someone is in those documents every day. There are two
justifications for imaging: 1) frequent and urgent retrieval (think call
center needing documents to answer someone's query) and 2) to protect vital
records (microfilming is still an option).

If you're going to do this correctly, the documents need to be properly
imaged -- and that means document level indexing, thorough QA, and a good
system to store and retrieve the documents. You can't simply make thousands
of PDFs, magically OCR them into full text indexing, and store them in
Google Drive. (Well, you could, but you'd save money by just shredding them
to get the same result.)

I'm sure Fred's spreadsheet is more accurate, but my rule of thumb was at
least $100 per standard records box to do it correctly.

I'd also suggest that unless you're in those boxes all the time, running a
25,000 box offsite records center is pretty expensive, simply to cover the
dedicated labor (unless you're sharing labor between active records and
offsite records).  My (very dated) experience is that you needed around
40,000 boxes to start to meet the unit costs of a commercial vendor,
assuming a fairly inactive base of records and a steady flow of new boxes
and destructions. So a well-negotiated contract with a commercial records
center might be the way to go.

On Wed, Feb 17, 2016 at 10:25 PM, Paulus, Kelly A <[log in to unmask]>
wrote:

> Can you post this for me as a listserv email to everyone:
>
>
> Are there any utility companies (preferably electric companies) on this
> list that do not have a record center, or a centralized place where you
> store hard copy records?  My company is interested in getting rid of our
> company-owned record center (25,000 boxes) by hiring an outside company to
> convert them into electronic format.  If so, would you be willing to share
> your experience(s) with me?  We are looking at completing this by end of
> 2017.
>
> Kelly Paulus | Lead RMC-I.T./EU | Sr. Records and Information Management
> Analyst
> Records and Information Management | phone: (610) 774-5239 |
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>
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