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If you need a machine and don’t buy it, you pay for it without getting it….Henry Ford

By Richard Porter-Roth posted 04-04-2011 12:47

  

Metaphorically speaking, scanning paper into digital files is the machine that many companies are not buying but ultimately paying for over and over again. Paper sitting in vast storage warehouses, internal file rooms, and department file areas is a recurring cost center that will not go away.

In the San Francisco Bay Area, a Pacific Gas & Electric (PG&E) gas line exploded in a neighborhood killing people and leveling the entire neighborhood. This happened in September of 2010 and since the explosion, PG&E has been frantically searching its records to prove that the pipeline was not flawed when originally built and put into the ground. These records are, apparently, still in paper and PG&E emptied a warehouse full of paper records to another location to facilitate the search process.

Headlines from the San Francisco Chronicle tell part of the story:

March 5, 2011:

“PG&E Launches huge paper chase for pipeline data”

PG&E …”has recruited employees to the Cow Palace grounds for a round-the-clock search through tens of thousands of boxes of paperwork.

Their job: Find proof in documents, some of them crumbling and dating back decades, that PG&E's gas lines are as safe as the utility says they are.

For the past couple of days, forklifts have been carting pallets loaded with 30 boxes each into three warehouses outside the 70-year-old arena in Daly City. Friday afternoon, there were still more than 100 pallets stacked outside the warehouses waiting to go in.

"There are 100,000 boxes in there, and you can't believe the papers spread everywhere," one PG&E employee said as she took a break. "There are records in there going back to the 1920s.

"Boy, what happens if there was a fire at the Cow Palace right now? You'd lose an awful lot of history."”

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2011/03/04/MNDE1I4GL5.DTL#ixzz1IU1hx2CS

The photo below should bring shivers to any records manager and goose bumps to any imaging salesman.

Tens of thousands of boxes with PG&E paperwork are being moved to the Cow Palace so workers can sift through the documents.
Photo: Susana Bates / Special to The Chronicle

 

Just following the headlines from the San Francisco Chronicle tells the rest of the story:

March 9, 2011

PG&E faces fines, sanctions over pipeline records

March 16, 2011

PG&E threatened with fines by PUC

California regulators threatened to impose fines Wednesday against Pacific Gas & Electric for what they said was PG&E's "inexcusable" refusal to turn over documentation

Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2011/03/16/MNRB1ID5MK.DTL#ixzz1IU3NAi35

March 21, 2011

PG&E Asks for more time to verify pipeline safety

Faced with fines and other penalties for missing a March 15 deadline, PG&E has asked the California Public Utilities Commission for additional months …. Some documentation won't be available until the end of the year, PG&E said in a request for leniency it filed with the PUC on Monday.

PG&E missed the March 15 deadline, but argued that the task was enormous. The company said it wrote to 37,000 "current and former employees and contractors," asking whether they have documents PG&E can't find.

Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2011/03/21/BA231IGH6K.DTL#ixzz1IWDvQBP8

March 24, 2011

PG&E Agrees to $3 million fine over safety records

Pacific Gas and Electric Co. agreed Thursday to pay an unusual gas-safety-related fine of $3 million for what state regulators called "willful non-compliance" with orders to provide key documents about transmission pipelines.

And, “…an "unusual" deal had been reached with PG&E, in which the agency would impose $3 million in immediate fines and an additional $3 million if the company does not stick to a compliance timetable.

Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2011/03/24/BAN61IJ2GV.DTL#ixzz1IU4JIcr4
 

My disclaimer: I live in the Bay Area but have not worked for or consulted with PG&E nor done any type of business with PG&E (except that I am a PG&E customer).

My thoughts on this are that PG&E must not have scanned archival documents nor do they have a records management system that would allow them to track and access paper documents and records by searching the system. And, perhaps they do have an ECM/RM system and this exercise at the Cow Palace represents the documents that were not in the system but were brought out to fully search all available records that PG&E has in its possession. Also, take note of the quote above in which a PG&E worker says that "There are records in there going back to the 1920s.”

While not knowing what was in the 100,000 boxes brought to the Cow Palace, it is a safe bet the many of the boxes contained documents and records that should have been destroyed years ago. I did a consulting project at a large company that had over 1 million boxes of records in storage and my project was to determine how many of those boxes could be destroyed. As part of the project, we popped the tops on a statistical sample to document the contents against the records management program’s citations. If the contents and citation were in synch and the records (or any record in the box) was not on legal hold, we could destroy the box with the approval of the owner (there were a few other qualifications).

What we found in these boxes was astonishing. We found box after box of “records” such as simple purchase receipts from the 1950s, or “Bob Smiths desk contents and book shelf contents” from 1962. As part of another project for the same company, we also found that “at least” 50% of all “records” were past any retention schedule guidelines but were kept because no person or department would authorize destruction of the records (in many cases the records were so old that nobody would “own” them and therefore would refuse to authorize destruction). In other consulting work I’ve found that 50% is a good rule of thumb when estimating what percentage of documents, whether paper or electronic, are past retention and past their destruction date.

While there is much food for thought here, and many, many conclusions to be drawn, I want to focus on the following:

  1. If PG&E has a good ECM/RM system, it did not serve its purpose – perhaps because they didn’t do or complete a backfile conversion – it may have been too costly to undertake but then we have the $3 million fine with a good chance of another $3 million fine.
  2. I’m quite sure that of 100,000 boxes taken to the Cow Place that possibly 50% of those boxes should have been destroyed years ago, which would have cut 50% of the cost of the Cow Palace operation.
  3. PG&E will be at greater legal risk for many years because they cannot document certain parts of their business … “The company said it wrote to 37,000 "current and former employees and contractors," asking whether they have documents PG&E can't find.”
  4. And finally, although it looks like the records were not in a destruction cycle of any sort, PG&E will now be legally obligated to keep those records for as long as they are part of litigation concerning the explosion (even if the records could have been destroyed years ago). Further, if they can’t document what is in a box, they will basically have to keep everything. Retention rules for keeping documents that are part of a legal hold can be very long.

So going back to my initial metaphor, PG&E is paying many times over what it would have cost to institute a good records keeping program, to fund a project to destroy records that are past their retention date, and fund the scanning and archival preservation of documents that are critical records to their business.



#paper #ScanningandCapture #Capture #ElectronicRecordsManagement #Records-Management #documentimaging
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