STORES Magazine - April 2009 - (Page 46) NUTS AND BOLTS / DIGITAL ARCHIVING Reducing Sticky Situations Digital archiving helps secure data for Cinnabon franchisee cial sector, the SEC requires hedge fund managers and trading firms to preserve a comprehensive record of each securities transaction. Casdex offers online storage with the write-once, read-often functionality required by the SEC. Food service has become a profitable vertical for the burgeoning technology firm. In November, Baja Fresh signed a deal to digitize the human resources records for each of its 300 stores. CinnaWorks, the largest franchisee of Cinnabon, followed suit two months later, and it also wanted headquarters to have access to encrypted store-level files. “Having a centralized service that scans, maintains and preserves our documents will greatly help streamline our process and make us even more efficient,” says Robert Raine, HR manager for CinnaWorks. The process begins at store “Having a cenlevel. An entry-level employee tralized service fills out all the necessary paperthat scans, work. Where the manager once maintains and copied and mailed this paperpreserves our work to headquarters, he now scans it and a PDF is e-mailed via documents will Casdex’s secure system. greatly help Going paperless Several years ago, CinnaWorks set a goal of creating a paperless office. “There is the — Robert Raine, BY FRED MINNICK environmental aspect of digital CinnaWorks archiving,” Raine says. “It he digital age is (slowly) eliminating the need for saves on a lot of unneeded paper. E-mail has replaced lengthy proposals on parchment; Powerwaste. There’s the paperwork aspect of Point presentations have taken the place of poster board charts. And it — just sheer volumes of paperwork, those paper application forms? They’re on the way out, too. transporting that paperwork, and then storing that paperwork here at our ofAt the vanguard of this trend is digital it,” says David Barley, founder and chief fice. There’s that false sense of security archiving, which aids the green movetechnology officer of Casdex. “We’re with a paper archive: Everybody seems ment and is more secure than storing able to leverage economies of scale and comfortable with it, only because it’s paper files. Some companies, however, provide digital archiving to them.” been the standard for so long.” have found digital archiving to be both Solutions from Thousand Oaks, One major drawback to paper expensive and time consuming. That’s Calif.-based Casdex have been adopted archives, he says, is that when you need why a growing number have opted to in the legal and financial industries, to retrieve a document to find somework with third parties that scan and where storage strategies have not thing, you often have to “pore through upload documents to a secure system. changed much since the 1930s. But with files and drawers of paperwork until “If an archive is difficult to use or if the courts now accepting “e-discovery” you find what you’re looking for. The you have to go buy servers and you have for trials and hearings, there’s an inadvantage of having a digital solution is to hire people to maintain them, you’re creasing need for lawyers to go digital. we can just type in a search and pull that not really going to get any benefit from To monitor compliance in the finaninformation up in a fraction of the time streamline our process and make us even more efficient.” T 46 STORES / APRIL 2009 WWW.STORES.ORG http://WWW.STORES.ORG
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