Archive management is now also digital

Malta Independent Thursday, 28 February 2013, 09:46 Last update: about 13 years ago

The warehouse is anonymous in an anonymous street somewhere in Malta. I had to give an assurance I would not reveal its whereabouts (or else, I joked to myself, they would have blindfolded me and taken me there). Inside, rows and rows of shelving hold hundreds of boxes, all exactly the same except for a barcode. This is the secure storeroom of Documents Archive Management (DAM), a specialist company providing off-site confidential secure document management solutions, now in its third year of operation.

And now, through a recent agreement, DAM has partnered with SG Solutions, a strategic partnership through which clients are offered a turnkey solution that also covers secure document archive management in electronic format.

Speaking to The Malta Business Weekly, Neville Lia from SG Solutions and Silvan Fleri from DAM explained that archiving of documentation is becoming an important segment of business management which is best outsourced to the experts in the field.

Companies, such as those in the insurance and financial services sector, are legally bound to retain documentation for a minimum number of years. These companies find that archiving takes up a considerable amount of time, effort and expense. Enter DAM, which can organise the retained papers at the principal’s place of work or else can do this in its own site.

The papers are collected in boxes according to a pre-set system determined by the principal and stored in such a way they are instantly retrievable by means of the barcode.

The principal can even order the documentation according to a system chosen by him so that not even the employees at DAM know how this system works.

Document management is also being offered electronically by SG Solutions. The physical documents are scanned either directly at the customer’s site or at DAM and stored into an electronic storage. Together with the electronic document, which is now text searchable, keywords and indexes are automatically extracted and stored along each document enabling improved searching and retrieval facilities when the need arises. The documents stored can be retrieved by registration date, policy stream, client account reference, or any other retrieval criteria.

Once the data is in electronic format, it can be analysed in ways that would be otherwise impossible, or too cumbersome to perform in paper document collections. Reports on purchasing trends, business opportunities, sales and much more are achieved at the touch of a button. One can also insert multiple security features, such as encryption, version control of various documents and multiple audit trails.

SG Solutions Limited is a member of the VJ Salomone Group of Companies. The company was incorporated in 2004 as a result of a merger between BDS Limited and VJ Salomone (Equipment) Ltd. Both of these companies were pioneers in the Maltese ICT industry and together boasted some 40 years experience in the sector. SG Solutions is one of Malta’s leading technology companies and offers a full range of IT services and solutions in Malta and overseas, ranging from consultancy, hardware procurement, printer distributors, software supply and development as well as systems integration and support.

DAM is a professional company resulting from the partnership between Combined Maritime Services and Express Trailers Ltd, and with a team of people having long years of experience in providing services to SME and corporate firms. DAM directors have considerable knowledge in banking, logistics and transport business and successfully lead their own business organisations, which are leaders in their respective business sectors.

The two companies came across each other since they essentially carry out the same business function, one physically and the other electronically. By joining forces, both SG Solutions and DAM are able to offer a complete turnkey solution to prospective clients.

Over the past months, they say, many companies in Malta, like others abroad, have started to come to a conclusion that their hearts are not really into archive keeping but more in their main line of business. That is also why for many companies the archive is the last place they spend money on. Then, as time goes by, their archives get more and more messy and one is unable to retrieve anything. What one fails to realise is that money is still being spent to rent a store for paper storage, or allocating an area in one’s own premises to keep long term documents, an area which could otherwise be used more fruitfully. And following such an investment the information is all there, but if not organised how can it be retrieved or analysed? It is plain useless.

So if one has to invest in archiving, why not leave proper archiving to professionals.