Shredding and storage discounts available to Rice

Rice’s Procurement Office is shredding the cost of shredding and storing documents.

Starting Jan. 1, departments that use Iron Mountain Inc. for storage and information management will be able to obtain those services at a rate that is about half the cost they have been paying.

As an educational institution, Rice is eligible to participate in the state comptroller’s purchasing cooperative, TxSmartBuy, which has negotiated significantly lower fees with Iron Mountain.

In the past, Iron Mountain has worked with individual departments at Rice and charged different rates based on the volume of business. With TxSmartBuy, the entire university will be charged one rate.

“The rates are unbelievably low because we’re leveraging the purchasing power of the entire state of Texas,” said Brian Soika, director of procurement, who is consolidating of all the Iron Mountain accounts at Rice. He estimates that the university spends more than $100,000 a year on onsite and offsite shredding and offsite storage, and the average reduction in Rice’s bill will be about 64 percent.

Procurement will pay the bill for the university and then seek reimbursement from individual departments based on the level of service they use.

Soika said departments that are using the services of other companies for storage will have to pay a fee to those companies if they want to move their documents to Iron Mountain, but in the long run, the savings will more than cover that cost.

Procurement will be contacting the departments that currently use Iron Mountain to explain the new fee structure. Departments that are not current customers of Iron Mountain will be able to participate in the new system by signing up on a special website that will be created sometime in December. Watch for details at buy.rice.edu.

Questions can be directed to Soika at 713-348-4726 or brian.soika@rice.edu.