ABSTRACT
In all of the strategic planning, decision-making and feasibility studies that took place during the consultation period to decide whether or not to outsource, I took it upon myself to actually go out and talk to other colleagues in my profession who had already outsourced their records management function. This enabled me to gauge the pros and cons of outsourcing for
myself. Thus, I developed a questionnaire and surveyed 22 leading UK companies. Sadly, according to the responses, there is no evidence to suggest that any of the companies bothered with the formalities of a business improvement evaluation assessment-a stark indicator, perhaps, of corporate naïveté or negligence. At first glance, all seem to have merely plucked aspirational objectives out of the air and sacrificed control of their records management facility in order to achieve them. Happily, however, the scope of drivers (the most common of which are given in Figure 6.1) would suggest there has been at least some structure to their approach. From the survey (and as reflected in Figure 6.1), cost saving emerged
as the primary objective (11%), but only marginally so. Improved security, a perceived increase in the volume of stored records, improved staff efficiency and corporate image were all considered to be almost equally important. It is notable that this and the wide range of drivers are broadly in line with other outsourcing trends, and are widely publicized in numerous publications, websites, journals and other media. The effective areas and average cost savings that were achieved by those companies that sought to outsource are given in Figure 6.2. It
is interesting that 35% of the accrued cost savings relate to a in archiving space. This is not surprising. From the ducted with senior managers in the records management the cost of archiving space remains a major concern for particularly those accommodated within inner London. To illustrate the point, a four-drawer filing cabinet occupies approximately 1 sq. m of floor space. Floor space within inner London for 2009 cost on average £1,281
per sq. m annually. By comparison, the six-to-eight rage boxes (405mm x 355mm x 265mm) that most records suppliers provide for their clients would store the entire filing cabinet at an average cost of £40 per annum-an immediate
6.2 Areas of cost savings
The claimed reduction in staff costs (41%) is also worthy of note. This sort of figure is indicative of significant redundancies, a regrettable inevitability perhaps, but from a business perspective a positive benefit, particularly in light of the 36% of cost savings (see Figure 6.3) that were reported to have been invested in training (and probably multi-skilling) residual staff, which in turn has possibly contributed towards the significant increases that were reported in business productivity (details are given in Figure 6.7, in section 6.6).
