Cost is an issue, there’s no argument about that in these credit crunch stricken days. But what are the clever ways of saving money? I was intrigued to hear about one of our solicitor clients who had to make a number of redundancies and then found themselves with an empty floor in a building they had a long lease on.
Problem: they had to carry on paying for an empty floor that they could not find another tenant for in these difficult times.
Solution: they put our high density Monotrak mobile storage in and then move their offsite storage back on site to save their offsite storage costs and also improve dramatically their retrieval times of archived files.
Sounds neat and of course we are always pleased to supply our product to clients; a by-product is always that we reduce the square footage occupied by storage and so naturally save rental cost, but would it work in this particular example? I didn’t have access to their calculations so decided to work the numbers myself and see if this could work.
Let’s use in this example 6,000 archive boxes, probably a typical size of archive for a solicitors firm. This would occupy around 9,000 cubic feet in an archive area. If we ignore the original transfer which would cost around £5k (all my figures are based on typical figures I’ve come across in the industry and of course will vary from firm to firm), the monthly cost of storage would be between £2k and £6k, depending on the environment. So let’s say £4k per month typically, but remember retrieval from off site is expensive, if the firm is retrieving just one box per day this adds £400 per month!
So our regular monthly cost is £4,400 per month for 6,000 archive boxes.
But what does mobile high density storage cost? A basic Monotrak system with no frills that could hold 6,000 archive boxes would cost as a one off purchase, under £50k and occupy 3,808 cubic feet.
This basically means you could achieve payback of the mobile system against the offsite storage we costed above in less than one year!
I suppose we now understand the logic of the solicitors who moved their product back. However, there is a sting in the tail. Some offsite storage firms charge a hefty figure for permanent withdrawal of product. For the 6000 boxes in the example above it could be £16k excluding transport. This would have to be taken into account too.
If this method of cost saving appeals to you, Rackline would be happy to run a cost comparison for you and see if your particular situation could benefit.
