As the manufacturing industry evolves, records and information management (RIM) and information governance (IG) must keep with rising demands for digitization, compliance, and sustainability.
As your business grows, it generates more information, making records management more complex. To avoid falling out of compliance, you need to make sure your document retention procedures evolve in step.
That’s often easier said than done. Information management systems are growing at a rate of 100% every five years, according to a 2023 study by the Association for Intelligent Information Management (AIIM). The average company now uses four or five different information systems, and 14% of organizations use seven to 10.
The growth of remote and hybrid work has further intensified the challenge, requiring organizations to extend retention oversight to the data employees access and store across multiple locations and devices.
Failure to keep up with retention policies may go unnoticed for some time, but it can lead to serious consequences if it’s not addressed. That’s why you need to future-proof your retention strategy. By using the right technology, policies, and processes, you can grow your business worry-free, not only ensuring proper retention but also improving efficiency as you scale.
Read on to learn how!
Investing in technology that scales with your organization and adapts to changing regulations creates a solid foundation for growth while minimizing the need for costly updates and overhauls later. Here are some important features to look for in records retention management software:
If your organization is evaluating software solutions to better manage retention, then consider if Virgo™ meets your needs. Virgo is a cloud-based records retention software that delivers accurate retention and privacy policies mapped to legal research, your repositories of record, and information.
Retention policies, which define how long documents must be kept and how to dispose of them, are the backbone of an efficient records management strategy. As you scale, maintaining standardization and simplicity can get complicated. Here are two ways to make it easier.
Today’s organizations are increasingly shifting to time-based triggering, which schedules retention periods based on a record’s creation date instead of depending on the conclusion of events whose timing is often uncertain or delayed. This makes retention periods easier to follow, ensures outdated data is promptly disposed of, and helps maintain compliance with regulatory requirements. In addition, policies such as “Retain for seven years after creation” or “Dispose of records from the previous fiscal year” can be automated, saving staff time.
As the manufacturing industry evolves, records and information management (RIM) and information governance (IG) must keep with rising demands for digitization, compliance, and sustainability.
Are your retention policies being applied and updated consistently across the organization? Without the right procedures in place, how do you know? The solution is to establish processes that ensure compliance and evolve to meet new needs. They include:
Future-proofing your retention strategy is an investment in long-term success. By deploying scalable technology, simplifying retention policies, and creating effective processes, you can be assured of robust compliance, even as the organization scales to achieve yet-unknown heights.
For a real-life example of how the right technology, policies, and processes can be implemented to improve retention compliance across the organization, watch the webinar recording of “From Start to Finish: The Marathon of Improving and Maintaining Your Retention Schedule.” During the webinar, Michele Dodaro of Northern Trust shared how they developed their retention schedule from confusing spreadsheets to user-friendly software and transformed a once confusing and inconsistent process into a sustainable, structured system with a clear path forward.
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