Greetings from the Freezing Mid-West!

I am seeking customer opinions on Skupsky's Retention Manager or Zasio's Versatile Retention software.  Here is some background on my project.

During 2011, I will be conducting record inventories of the departments here in Indianapolis in order to develop a records retention schedule for this site.  We currently have a schedule but it was developed for a pharmaceutical business unit and we are a medical device business unit and consequently, has been difficult to implement because the records series don't match what we create and file in our division.

In my past life in hi-tech I hired a consultant to bring in 10-15 people to swoop through the company and perform the inventories and regulatory research for me and this info was put into our records management system.  During my time in higher education, I had the departments/colleges fill out the records inventories and I kept these in individual spreadsheets because we were so siloed that each dept/college operated like its own business and we only scheduled "regulatory required" records.  And since we had no money, I performed the regulatory research unless the department was fully versed on their regulatory requirements.

Now that I will be conducting these inventories and collecting a pretty significant amount of data in order to create the retention schedules, I am thinking I should either develop an Access database to collect all of this data or possibly purchase Skupsky's Retention Manager or Zasio's Versatile Retention software to use to manage this data and create the new retention schedules.  Since I have changed industries, the regulatory research that comes with these software packages might be useful as well to check against all of my prior regulatory research that I have catalogued.

So here is my question, for those who have purchased, which software did you choose and why?  What did you think the strengths and weaknesses were in each?  Was there anything you thought it could do and then found out it couldn't?  What do you like/dislike about the reporting abilities of each?  Were you happy with your purchase and support from the company? Were there any glaring omissions in the regulatory research that you uncovered?  Did these omissions get corrected quickly?  Were you able to document the revision history for the retention schedule as you made changes/corrections to it during annual review cycles?

I already have an RFP developed for this type of application so I know what my requirements are but I would really like to hear from my peers what your thoughts are on these applications before I get my IT and Purchasing people involved.

Thanks so much and please feel free to provide your comments privately to me at [log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]> or via phone at 317-521-4734.


Thanks!
Cheryl Westlund, CRM
Manager, Records Management

Roche Diagnostics Operations, Inc.
9115 Hague Road, P.O. Box 50416
Indianapolis, IN 46250-0416
Phone: 1-317-521-4734
[log in to unmask]


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