Client Examples

Providing An Audit Trail

Sunrise Medical, based at Wollaston in the West Midlands, is one of the world’s largest manufacturers of homecare and extended care products, helping to improve peoples quality of life. Products include mobility, respiratory and daily living aids, lifting hoists and ‘augmentative communication devices’, to speak for those with speech disorders.

Sunrise Medical have manufacturing plants in the USA and Europe and distribute their products in over 90 countries. Their European operations are conducted from Wollaston, where Dave Griffiths is the Manufacturing Support Manager.

Dave Griffiths said: “The majority of our hard copy records need to be kept for seven years and this period generally covers an individual product life cycle. Our outsourced archiving tends to be mainly human resources and financial records. This includes such items as credit control information, sales and purchasing invoices, returns notes, purchasing documentation, export files, correspondence with Government Departments and payroll reports”.
“Internal departments retain their own records until they run out of space, then periodic bulk shipments are organised to our archive contractor –MSR Eurostore Limited - in Dorset”.

Dave continued: “MSR Eurostore supply us with new storage boxes and we organise indexing, boxing and labelling prior to despatch. MSR Eurostore arrange collection, bar code each box and enter the content descriptions into their computerised index system. We then receive a detailed spreadsheet so that both MSR Eurostore and ourselves know exactly what is in the archive store and how it is indexed”.

Matthew Lewin is the Tax Manager for Europe at Sunrise Medical and he needs to be assured of fast access to archive documents for tax, VAT and audit trails. Matthew commented: “I fax a description of any document required to be retrieved and within 48 hours, or faster if it is needed, the original documents are returned to me”.

“Sometimes I can be quite specific about the document required, at other times I may only be able to provide a period number, subject or indicate which batch a file may be located in”.

“Before awarding our contract for archive storage we gave careful consideration to aspects of security, confidentiality, efficiency and cost, although the geographical location of the archive store was quite a low factor. Storage charges are based on a ‘per box/per month’ basis and we are billed twice a year, which suits us very well”.