At a time when customers expect ever greater speed and responsiveness, companies need to be able to respond with agility. Retrieving an archive should not be difficult and should not affect the productivity of the company. It is therefore in companies’ best interest to archive their documents and do so in a well-considered manner.
“When you run a business it’s like you are the head of a family. With that position comes both rights and responsibilities,” says Samuel Mergui, Managing Director of the AGS Records Management division. A duty to keep a record of active information, daily information (such as payslips, invoices, or client proposals) or a duty to conserve hospital patients’ medical records or insurance or credit records. Because among the sectors that keep the most documents, the health, banking and insurance industries take first place.
Legal, financial and historical considerations
Far from being a simple storage solution, records management is becoming a vital necessity for companies facing ever-increasing challenges. First, legally speaking, documents are subject to a lifespan. Secondly, in terms of security, groups must ensure that the information stored in the archives is preserved and that confidentiality is maintained. And from a financial point of view, archiving documents generates real space gains, eliminates costs and thus improves the productivity of the entity.
But we can’t talk about archiving without talking about the weight and importance of history. The institutional memory of a company has great value and constitutes its wealth. Brands have an undisputed heritage value but also a real market value. But a brand with no history, no valued and valuable past is like an empty shell. “A company that wants to grow can only do so according to a business plan that is based on its experience and institutional memory. You have to preserve your memory to avoid the disappearance of your company,” says Samuel Mergui.
Introduce a real archiving policy
Faced with all these challenges, companies must certainly archive their documents, but above all implement a real archiving policy. “Records management is a significant competitive advantage in a world where people want agility and an ever-faster response,” says the Managing Director of the AGS Records Management Division. The concept of time is no longer the same and we need to know how to adapt to it in order to build customer loyalty.
Good document management means finding an archived document easily and therefore saving time, eliminating duplicates and reducing storage space, reducing storage costs and ensuring the physical integrity of all archived documents.
Each company has its own archiving policy
Each trade or industry has its own set of rules. When a company decides to review the organisation of its archives, understanding and auditing are essential. Tailored to each company, the archiving policy must ensure efficient, sustainable and comprehensive document management. The entity must both classify and keep available all the elements useful to its business activity, and at the same time maintain an archive to have a long-term overview of the records.
“We help companies to think about the best way to manage their archives and advise them on the range of solutions they can implement to ensure that their archiving is as effective and efficient as possible,” says Samuel Mergui.
Among the tools available to companies, we offer physical archiving, in highly secure Conservation centres. We also offer digital records management via an electronic archiving system (EAS), designed to store documents of probative value in a secure space. We can support any company of any size with a customised solution according to the type and volume of the records to be kept.
So, ready? Archive!
If you have any questions, we are here to answer them and assist you. Our archivists are at your disposal.