As the cost of office space continues to skyrocket, office managers everywhere are looking for better ways to conserve floor space. This trend has caused an extraordinary increase in use of vertical document storage systems in offices worldwide.

Most filing and storage systems found in office supply stores are designed for letter or legal-size documents. The large drawings, maps, and charts required by engineering and architectural firms have been stored mainly in flat files or “pigeonholes” in the past. By storing the documents in a flat position, the footprint of the “old fashioned” storage systems naturally take up a lot of expensive floor space.

Vertical storage filing systems store the same number of documents as the “older” three and five drawer flat files, but require 75 percent less space. Office administrators and project managers have experienced a 68 percent saving in time spent retrieving and storing drawings, since it typically takes less than 10 seconds to find and remove a document when using vertical storage systems. Users of flat file storage systems waste time sifting through files to find and remove documents.

For example, Armando Cruz with the San Diego Water Department says, “Prior to using vertical storage we used a crate system. We converted to a vertical storage system because it saved so much room and it was convenient for organizing our work. We have each drawing stored in numerical order, and can easily separate between each project. Vertical storage gives us the freedom to set up our own organization system. The primary reason we continue to use vertical storage is because of space savings”.

With savings in floor space and filing time, vertical storage makes good business sense. The reduced foot print yields significant cost savings by redeploying valuable floor space to revenue producing activities.