Halcrow
Overview
We were awarded an exclusive national contract for a leading firm of planning, design and management consultants, Halcrow Group Limited, in May 2010.
The initial remit was to uplift circa 45,000 boxes from their 11 incumbent suppliers across the UK and to transfer to the local Cintas storage facilities, accompanied by a phased data import to update our database records with all the electronic info deemed relevant by Halcrow.
The main objective for Halcrow was to consolidate their existing archives into one national supplier and centralise their archiving procedures across the business. They have 25 offices throughout the UK and they require a mixture of whole box and file box archives.
The Migration
The Swindon (head office) element of the project formed the bulk of the quantities to be transferred, with 16,000 migrating boxes. Half of the records were individual files (projects) based in wooden containers, stored in numerical order, which the supplier had a record of, the second part were whole boxes.
Inventories had not been previously held for these records by the incumbent suppliers and the authorised users therefore were required to attend our storage facilities to review these records (80 boxes of individual files per day were reviewed).
We begun with project meetings with Halcrow and the incumbent suppliers regarding contracts, notice periods, termination charges and other contractual matters. Once agreement was reached on this aspect of the project, we discussed the logistics of the transfer - collection sites, dates and timescales, volumes out per day, access and security issues, pallet manifests, equipment exchange and other uplift matters.
Upon project commencement (this was split into two phases), we collected various volumes of boxes every weekday, and processed this same number at our storage facilities (catalogued, scanned, labelled and put-away, therefore showing as ‘in-store’ to Halcrow) daily.
This was managed by a very straight-forward process for logging new ‘transferring’ files whereby our office team catalogued every individual file within each box capturing the Halcrow’s reference number.
Once processed, Cintas bar-codes were placed on each file and box as its container and then putaway to preallocated shelves.
With the other sites (mostly whole boxes) our warehouse migration team labelled each new box in-bound with a Cintas bar-code and then utilising our hand held scanners, used this to scan the Cintas barcode, the old supplier barcode and then scan the box to its warehouse location; this produces a location specific item record on our FileTrak database that we were later able to match (using the old barcode number)with the electronic data we had to supplement the data held for each item and update accordingly.
At Halcrow’s request we produced a special itemised report relating to each container as well as a weekly report confirming progress, issues and volumes and there were frequent discussions with Halcrow, Cintas and the nominated project lead at the incumbent supplier to ensure small variances were able to be accommodated and any risks mitigated.
In tandem we allocated dedicated IT resource to perform the electronic updates weekly as items put-away were processed.
When Phase 1 had been successfully completed, we commenced Phase 2 to complete the migration of the remaining records following the above mentioned project process.
A reconciliation was performed between actual boxes in against supposed boxes in and the variance passed back to the incumbent suppliers to manage and advise.
Smaller migrations in London (2,000 boxes), Birmingham (2,200 boxes) and Manchester (2,000 boxes) were undertaken following the same process.
Contact Details
Our key contact at Halcrow is Bob Friend who will be more than happy to discuss his experience of Cintas’s management of this project, with you. He is contactable on:
Email: FriendB@Halcrow.com
Tel: 01392 354690 , Mobile 07709 484166
