Until an office move or restack, many companies don't see filing as a priority and they are then often surprised to actually find out how much non-live documentation is being held on-floor. Add to this unclaimed cabinets full of files left behind by those who've either changed departments or left the company and you end up having a lot of redundant filing being moved to the new location simply because nobody has had the time to identify and isolate it.

Office move companies generally don't focus on dealing with this excess filing and getting it off-site so a huge chance is missed to 'clean house' and it simply follows the company to the new offices where it once again takes up valuable floor space. They aren't geared up to spending time with the users before the move to determine which documentation is really needed to support the business and what documents can be archived. Their job is just to move furniture, IT and filing from the old office to the new one.

This is where Filing Relocation steps in. We make it a priority to establish what filing is no longer live together with identifying all unclaimed filing and then we process both these groups to either archive or destruction.

It's a simple trade-off that's at the heart of all office moves: decreasing the number of filing cabinets needed offers up more floor space for desking or, in overall terms, means that less floor space is needed for the company as a whole.

This has particular relevance where companies apportion their building and running costs to individual departments according to the area they occupy. Reducing the amount of floor space taken up has a dramatic effect on lowering the overall charge against a particular department's budget.

The main problem with reducing on-floor filing is getting the users to agree with having their non-live filing sent off-site to archive. The reluctance of the users to release such files is a combination of wanting to have all their files within 'arms reach' and a lack of confidence in the retrieval process from archive.

This is where Filing Relocation comes to the fore. FR project managers become a very visible presence on-floor in the lead up to the move, in some cases up to a couple of months in advance. During this time they forge close working relationships with the users to the point that there is very little about the users filing that they don't get to know.

The Filing Relocation team then rebuilds confidence in the client's archiving system showing how correct data inputting is the key to good archiving.

The final part is to get the users to actually release files that don't need to be kept on-floor. All they have to do once they've decided what can go is literally point at the files and Filing Relocation does the rest.

Filing Relocation project managers are known throughout the industry for their skills in this area. In essence it's all about getting to know the users and gently negotiating with them to get files released so that eventually reduction targets can be hit.