Protecting vital records and data

Storage services from Iron Mountain help standardise processes, reduce costs and improve busines resilience.

CHALLENGE: Standardising the process and reducing the cost of document archiving

SOLUTION: Records consolidation and document storage solution serving all Tribal UK offices

VALUE: Document storage suppliers reduced from twenty-one to one, simplifying the process and saving in excess of £35,000 per year

CLIENT

Tribal Group provides a wide range of products and services that support the delivery of education services around the world. Its work includes building world-leading software, supporting adult learning and career development, and providing school inspections and improvement services. Employing around 1300 people, Tribal has extensive experience in educational consultancy and transformation programmes. In the UK it is one of the leading providers of school inspection services for Ofsted, the Government regulator.

CHALLENGE

Tribal grew significantly between 1999 and 2008 through acquisition. As a consequence its operations spread to 42 offices across the UK.

Each office had made its own arrangements for archiving its paper records. Zoe Clarke, Property and Contracts Manager at Tribal, recalls: “We had no central policy for document archiving. Each office had its own way of operating and this had led to us having 21 different suppliers of document storage services. That meant our archives were fragmented and difficult to manage.”

With such a wide range of different document storage suppliers there was an opportunity to standardise the process and get better value for money. Tribal began the search for a single provider that could offer a nationwide service.

SOLUTION

After a formal selection process, Tribal chose Iron Mountain. This triggered a project to review all storage arrangements carefully and consolidate the records at Iron Mountain state-of-the-art storage centres. As well as client and project papers, Tribal stores documents such as company records, contractual and legal papers, and HR records.

On starting the project, it soon became clear that the task would be far from straightforward. Many of the documents sent to previous storage contractors had not been indexed properly. Records were inconsistent, often inadequate, and sometimes non-existent. Moreover, very few had defined retention periods.

Zoe Clarke adds: “We didn’t want to carry on storing material that was no longer of value to the business. Working with Iron Mountain we devised a process to review and catalogue documents for retention, and securely dispose of those no longer needed.”

The project focused on one storage contractor at a time, with Iron Mountain arranging the transfer of stored material for review. Across the almost two-year duration of the project, around 40,000 boxes were examined. For more than 9,000 of these, there was no written record of what they contained.

Unwanted records were earmarked for disposal and then securely shredded, while useful material was properly indexed, assigned a retention period and sent to store. Zoe Clarke adds: “Iron Mountain was very supportive throughout; its management of the project was excellent.”

Tribal has since rationalised its office space and now operates from 12 principal locations. Arletta Zardecka, Senior Property and Contracts Co-ordinator at Tribal, says: “Each of our sites has an Iron Mountain co-ordinator. These people can log in to the Iron Mountain customer portal to request documents for retrieval, or arrange for new documents to be sent to the archives. It’s a very straightforward system and very easy to use.”

VALUE

The records consolidation project allowed Tribal to reduce the volume of its paper archives by more than 80 per cent. Now, the entire archive has been reduced to 7000 boxes of documents stored with Iron Mountain. Each has its contents clearly documented, and each continues to be of value to the business. As a result, storage costs have plummeted, while the ease with which documents can be retrieved has substantially improved. Zoe Clark confirms: “We set a target to save the company £25,000 per annum, but with Iron Mountain’s help, we achieved a saving of £36,000.”

In addition to the document storage solution, Iron Mountain also protects electronic data. Tribal has a distributed IT infrastructure and backs up its data every night. In order to safeguard business continuity, the back-up tapes need to be stored securely off site.

Iron Mountain provides an off-site data protection solution where, each day, one of its high-security vans calls at selected Tribal sites to collect back‑up tapes for delivery to its climate‑controlled vault. Transportation is fully secure and there is a rigorous audit trail and chain of custody for clear accountability. Iron Mountain operates a 24/7 emergency response to ensure that if ever a back‑up tape were needed, the required tape could be delivered promptly to the desired recovery location.

Summarising the services Iron Mountain provides, Arletta Zardecka concludes: “I always find Iron Mountain to be very responsive to our needs and our account manager is very good. One of the biggest compliments I can give to Iron Mountain is that we never get any complaints about the service we receive. It just works.”