It may seem odd to suggest that storage could help your firm remain legal. However, on closer inspection, the proposition is not so outlandish. After all, these days running a company requires you to stay on top of a large amount of paperwork. You have to ensure certain health and safety documents are available and the appropriate protocol is being adhered to. Also, there are a number of insurance policies you are required to have.
In addition, if you employ other workers, you need to make sure all their contracts are legitimate and up-to-date. Similarly, your tax documents should be checked regularly, as should any licenses you require. Meanwhile, if you run one or more company vehicle, you need to make sure you keep track of its servicing and MOT record.
Staying abreast of all of these issues can be a nightmare and the likelihood that you will succeed is diminished if your office or factory is a mess. Without proper storage such as shelving units, you may struggle to ensure your operation remains fully legal all of the time. So, don’t wait until you accidentally contravene the law, get shelving or other similar products now so that you can keep a closer eye on your paperwork.
If you fail to act on this and simply leave things as they are, you may find yourself facing costly and damaging legal action. As a business owner, this is surely something you wish to avoid at all costs – and doing so may be easier than you think. Having the correct filing storage could be highly beneficial.
The accounts department is one of the busiest departments in the workplace. They have a large quantity of paperwork that has to be processed and entered onto their accounts system. Once the documents have been entered onto the system they are usually allocated a reference number, this is how the document is identified and it can then be filed away.
To make sure that the documents are easy to locate if they are needed, you have to store them in a document storage system. There are many different storage systems available, it really depends on the quantity of documents that you have to store.
Storage racks can be used for the documents, and there are supports that can be purchased and placed onto the shelves of the storage racks to hold the files in place.
You may have confidential documents in the accounts department such as banking details, payroll or personnel files. These need to be stored securely; this is where storage cabinets can be used as they feature a lock to restrict access. These cabinets have shelves inside and they can be adjusted to suit the documents you have to store.
All document storage systems need to be clearly labelled so that all employees in the accounts department can locate the document they need promptly. If you run out of space in the office you could also create an archive area in another part of the building, for those documents you need to store by law.
File storage and document storage, especially when be archived or stored with a company that specialises in information storage is made easier with the use of barcodes. In point of fact, barcodes have revolutionised industry and retail worldwide.
The concept of tracking things automatically was first investigated in 1932. A team of students at Harvard University explored the concept of using punched cards to select items from a catalogue given to the customer. The idea was explored by others for some years later, but unfortunately it was later abandoned in the end because the required technology was not available at the time. These days barcodes are a vital part of many file storage systems.
This year, 2010, will mark the 58th anniversary of the first barcode that was patented by two Americans, Norman Woodland and Bernard Silver. However this patent was for a ‘bull’s eye’ type of concentric circles design rather than the familiar set of straight lines used now. The research into how to produce an efficient system of tracking items no matter where they were used began with a remark overheard quite by chance.
Silver, a graduate of an Institute of Technology in Philadelphia, heard a local food store chain boss ask one of the Institute’s deans for a method of automatically reading the information about any item of produce. So Silver and Woodland in 1948, began to test different methods of doing this, including the use of inks that glowed under ultra-violet light. However, this method proved to be unreliable and too expensive for commercial use.
More than ever before, companies have become concerned about managing their content. By content, I am referring to information. A great deal of information in an average organisation is unstructured. Office documents, paper documents, images, computer generated reports, email and web content for example.
In the past, effectively managing document and file storage was simply a matter of having an efficient filing system and plenty of storage shelves.
Information Technology has caused a massive increase in the volume of data and organisations need to put strategies in place to keep control of this information so that it can be made best use of. Companies also need to make sure the information is not a liability to them and they can reduce the cost of storing it as much as possible.
Quite a lot of the unstructured content is what is termed ‘fixed content’ – information in its final form. The content will not change, but information about the content might change during its life span. Other content types are created as dynamic content objects, office documents and web content for instance. This simply means that they will be changed or modified over a period of time. However, eventually, much dynamic content becomes fixed as well.
Since most unstructured information is fixed or will become fixed, it seems logical for a company to seek storage solutions for fixed rather than dynamic content. Fixed content management solutions can deal with the costs and challenges associated with distribution and access to data using paper-based or microfiche methods.