The Organisation

Only a very thorough and innovative solution could address the highly dynamic requirements of one of Australia's busiest publishing houses.

The ACP Action Division of Australian Consolidated Press is a heavily deadline-oriented, office environment. The division publishes periodicals such as Trade-a-boat and Australian Motorcycle Trader which comment on and advertise specialised vehicles, equipment and machinery for sale.

The Challenge

ACP Action was using a combination of filing cabinets, suspension pockets hanging from open wooden frames and stacked archive boxes.

The wooden frames took up masses of floor space, their overloaded suspension pockets constantly broke and fell off the rails, and staff regularly required access to material in archive boxes.

The Solution

Formfile addressed the challenge by:

• Doing a thorough audit of their files
• Interviewing staff to learn how frequently they recover files and what perceived difficulties they were having with their filing
• Talking to management to learn what kind of outcome they would like to have

As a file could represent an entire magazine for a particular month the files at ACP Action tended to be very large. So it was obvious that Formfile Expanda Pockets were the ideal solution.

In the Trade Ads - Monochrome department the four drawer cabinets and open wooden frames provided the equivalent of 48 drawers (or 24 linear metres of filing). Installing 4 x 1200mm wide, 7 tier high bays provided 34 linear metres of shelf filing in less floor space.

The Trade Ads - Colour department had five filing cabinets consuming 3 square meters of office space. These were replaced with two open bays that consumed less than 1 square meter.

The filing cabinets in the Private Ads section were totally inadequate and could only store documentation from the past two months. This meant a lot of information had to be retrieved from archive boxes. These systems were replaced with three open bays and staff now has easy access to material up to 6 months old.