Los Alamos County is where the atomic bomb was developed and is located in the beautiful hills of New Mexico. In 2010, the county would be moving into a new building and knew there was going to be a tremendous challenge associated with making the move, so the county hired a new records administrator, Barb Ricci, to oversee and organize the project. Barb faced tens of thousands of documents, each varying from 5 pages to 100s of pages, all simply thrown into unlabeled boxes and dumped into cages in the old warehouse. Barb began to prepare them for the move to the new building. The county suggested getting storage units called PODS that would be stored out in the parking lot to hold all of these items during the transition.

Barb knew that this would not work, and started discussions with the county about the importance of safely storing and easily accessing these vital county records. It was at this time that she contacted our storage and access expert, Warren Wildenstein. Warren and Barb started working together on a Spacesaver Eclipse powered system.

As they worked through the various issues Barb faced, Warren saw a need for Barb to consider bar code tracking. Barb had heard of it and was interested in learning more and finding out how Improve Group could help. Warren introduced Barb to Jeffrey and Jeffrey took Barb to meet the records manager for PNM in Albuquerque, one of Improve Group’s customers, to show Barb what was possible.

Within 6 weeks, Jeffrey worked with Barb and developed a system to meet her record management needs. Through the direction of Jeffrey, Improve Group built a proprietary in-house system, installed it and trained Barb on how to most efficiently use it. Improve Group continues to partner with Barb for technical support and maintenance. Improve Group’s goal is always to come along side our customer and to help them be ultimately successful.

The result is a management system that will safely store and easily access the 50,000 records needed to support the county. As an example, if a police officer needed all the records for a case that was held three years ago, in the past, they would work through an excel spreadsheet and have to “dig” to find it. Today, with the use of Los Alamos’ system and bar code tracking, Barb can find the exact shelf and exact box that is holding the records she needs in a matter of seconds without any digging or guessing.