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As one of the nation’s leading records management companies, we seek to optimize the value of records and information on an enterprise-wide scale. We help clients find solutions to the most critical records management challenges facing business and government.

Zasio Consulting Services

Zasio Enterprises has long been a leader in the field of records and information management and retention; in fact, our company and its consulting staff have some of the most extensive experience in records retention in the U.S.

Our clients look to us for innovative, objective, thoughtful, and experienced advice. Whether they are running a records management program or trying to implement one—we provide answers. They call on us when they need to make decisions that will have a major impact on their employees, organizations, and the countries in which they operate. They call us when they want an enterprise-wide records management program.

We have written books that have literally defined the methodology for enterprise records retention as it is practiced throughout North America and elsewhere, and we have developed records retention programs for companies in virtually every line of business.

At Zasio Enterprises, we help people and companies explore efficient records management methods, create and maintain records retention schedules, and manage and comply with recordkeeping laws and regulations.

We do this by focusing on the following goals:

Enhance our retention management solutions or all media content

We consider that the evolution from the world of paper records management to include digital records management is one our key strengths. Most of our competitors in the electronic records management space lack competence in paper records management and consider this to be an old fashioned, dying business that they wish to avoid. On the contrary, our business model is predicated on the premise that paper and digital records will continue to exist, side-by-side, for another ten to twenty years, and that organizations will continue to require solutions for the management of both.

Enhance retention regulatory compliance solutions for our clients

First and foremost, organizations are obliged to comply with the law. Both business and governmental organizations are legally required to comply with numerous laws and regulations requiring certain of their records to be retained for specified periods of time. These include U.S. federal laws and regulations as well as those promulgated by other jurisdictions in which the organization conducts business. The only way to ensure that the organization is complying with these requirements is to perform proper legal research to locate these laws and regulations, incorporate them into the retention periods for the records series to which they apply, and faithfully implement the retention periods by destroying the records on schedule.

Help clients reduce their exposure to e-discovery and litigation risk

Today, every organization that delivers products or services of any kind (or that even hires employees) is faced with threats to its assets as a result of liability lawsuits. Even if your organization has committed no acts that could incriminate it in litigation, the act of complying with document discovery orders can be very burdensome and expensive. In fact, some studies have reported that pretrial discovery, including disclosure of records, accounts for as much as half the cost of civil litigation. Liability lawsuits are often decided on the basis of old records—records that need not exist if they had been properly destroyed under a formal records retention program. From a litigation risk avoidance perspective, your organization’s goal should be to retain only those records needed to conduct business, comply with the law, and meet reasonable needs for the preservation of archival documentation. All other records should be systematically destroyed under a formal records retention program based on retention periods that can be demonstrated to be reasonable, meaning not too long and not too short. Absent any actual or pending litigation or government investigation, such disposal is entirely legal and proper.

Control records growth

Various records management studies indicate that growth rates for paper records typically range between 5% and 10% each year, while the growth of electronic records generally falls between 20% and 60% each year and sometimes even higher. Unless organizations have comprehensive records retention program under which useless records are destroyed at the same rate at which new records are being generated, they have no effective means of controlling the growth of their records. Other studies indicate that most organizations retain somewhere between 30 and 60 percent more records than are necessary to conduct their business. Our experience has been that most organizations could immediately discard at least 30 percent of their oldest records and never miss them! But without a good records retention program, organizations simply have no way of addressing the problem of unrestrained retention and the resulting uncontrolled growth. The ultimate result is higher storage and maintenance costs.

Reduce records storage costs

Today, many organizations do not know how much they spend to store and maintain their records. Moreover, many managers and executives consider these costs to be unmanageable, in the sense that they are simply part of the overall cost of doing business.

Finally, many organizations have no plan in place to manage—and reduce—these costs. But if it is true that an organization is, in fact, retaining 30 to 60 percent more records than it needs, we would expect proportionate cost reductions from disposing of this redundant data. While these costs can be difficult to quantify, they are real and should be taken seriously as a management issue.