Business Management Firm File Room Mobile Shelving Case Study: Encino, California
How one of the country’s largest business management and accounting firms fit its client file room into a new Encino, California office using seismic-anchored high-density mobile shelving.
Customer
NKSFB, LLC
Location
15821 Ventura Boulevard, Suite 370, Encino, CA 91436
Product
Mechanical mobile shelving, six shelf levels per section, laminate end panels
Application
Client file room: upright letter and legal file folders
About the project
NKSFB, LLC is one of the largest business management firms in the United States, providing business management, tax, audit and forensic accounting services to clients in entertainment, music, sports and other fields. The firm was formed through the combination of several established practices and today runs multiple offices, including the Encino, California office at 15821 Ventura Boulevard.
Material Handling USA supplied high-density mobile shelving for the file room of that Encino office as the space was being built out. Business management work is document-heavy by nature, and the file room had to hold the firm’s active client files in a room sized by an office floor plan rather than by the paper.
Project scope at a glance
The situation
A business management and accounting practice runs on documents. Client engagement files, tax workpapers, audit files and correspondence all have retention obligations, and the working set has to stay in the office where staff can pull a file the same day it is asked for.
Traditional lateral file cabinets are the default in professional offices and the least efficient option in the room. Each cabinet needs its own clear pull-out space in front of it, and the cabinet body itself wastes vertical room. Static shelving stores more, but every run needs its own permanent aisle, so a file room quickly becomes mostly walkway.
In a leased office suite the file room is a fixed size decided during design, and no amount of purging changes the fact that a growing practice needs more filing than the room was drawn for. That is the point at which high-density mobile shelving becomes the only way to add capacity without taking a second room away from staff.
What Material Handling USA supplied
Material Handling USA supplied a mechanical mobile shelving system built to the file room’s own drawing: six mobile carriages plus stationary sections at each end of the run. Each section carries six shelf levels with two dividers per shelf, a configuration built specifically for upright letter and legal folders rather than boxes.
Each carriage is moved with a three-spoke handwheel. The gearing is what makes the system practical in an office: a fully loaded run of paper is heavy, and the handwheel lets one person open the aisle they need with light, controlled effort and no power. There is no motor, no controls and no wiring, so the file room needs no electrical work and nothing in it can fail.
The system uses a twin ramp rather than a raised wood sub-floor. The track is installed on the finished floor and low ramps bring the floor level up to it, which avoids building a platform in a leased office and keeps the room usable for carts. Laminate end panels finish the run so the system reads as office casework rather than warehouse shelving.
File room layout
The layout drawing below shows the file room as it was planned: a bank of mobile carriages with stationary sections at the ends, the single working aisle, and a side view of the six-level shelf configuration used throughout.
The drawing is also the engineering baseline. It establishes the run length, the number of carriages and the fully loaded system weight, which is the figure the structural engineer needs before the anchorage can be designed.
Seismic anchorage in California
California is the reason this project had an engineering step that an identical file room in another state might not. Storage shelving in a California building has to be anchored to resist earthquake motion, and a mobile shelving system is a special case: the shelving moves, so the anchorage design is about the track and the structure it is fixed to rather than the shelving alone.
For this project a licensed structural engineer produced stamped seismic anchorage design and sketches specifically for the mobile shelving system, using the layout drawing and the fully loaded system weight as inputs. Those stamped drawings are what a building department and a landlord’s construction team expect to see before installation, and they were supplied as part of the project.
The planning lesson is simple: in California and other high-seismic areas, budget both the cost and the calendar time for stamped engineering. It is not a formality that can be added at installation, because the anchorage detail has to be known before the track goes down.
Coordinating with an office construction schedule
This file room was part of a new office build-out, and the project’s own coordination record shows how that shapes a shelving order. The shipment was originally set for late August, then held twice at the construction team’s request as the build-out schedule moved, first by about five weeks and then again by two more. Installation was finally scheduled for the second week of November and ran about one week from start to finish.
Nothing about that is unusual, and it is worth planning for. A mobile shelving system installs on a finished floor in a room that is otherwise done, so its delivery date depends on trades that are outside the storage vendor’s control. Holding the order in the factory or in transit is far better than landing pallets in a suite that is not ready to receive them.
Two practical takeaways for anyone specifying a file room during a build-out: agree early on who gives the go-ahead to ship, and keep a realistic estimate of installation duration in the project schedule. A file room of this size took roughly a week to install, which the general contractor needed to know before committing to a move-in date.
What the firm gained
File cabinets vs. static shelving vs. mobile shelving
| Lateral file cabinets | Static file shelving | Mobile shelving (used here) | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Floor space per filing inch | Highest | Moderate | Lowest |
| Aisles or clearances | Pull-out space at every cabinet | One aisle per run | One shared moving aisle |
| Use of room height | Limited by cabinet height | Good | Six shelf levels per section here |
| Browsing files | One drawer at a time | Open shelf | Open shelf with dividers |
| Power required | No | No | No, mechanical handwheels |
| California anchorage | Required | Required | Stamped engineering supplied here |
How a professional services file room gets specified
Start by measuring the paper, not the room. Total filing inches, and the split between letter and legal folders, is what sets shelf depth, level spacing and how many sections are needed. Six levels per section with dividers, as used here, is a filing configuration rather than a general storage one.
Separate active files from retained files. Only the working set needs to be in the office suite at all; older retained material can often go to a lower-cost location, which changes how large the high-density system needs to be.
Then check the floor. Mobile shelving concentrates a lot of weight on a small footprint, so the fully loaded system weight matters to the structural engineer and, in a multi-story office building, to the landlord. This is also where the decision between a twin ramp and a recessed or raised sub-floor is made, and in leased space the twin ramp is usually the practical answer.
Plan the engineering and permitting early in high-seismic areas. Stamped anchorage design takes calendar time and has to be complete before the track is installed.
Finally, match the finish to the space. A file room inside a professional office should look like office casework, which is what laminate end panels are for.
Related reading: our law firm file room mobile shelving case study covers a similar professional services filing project, and the mobile shelving hub explains the mechanical, manual and powered options.
Frequently asked questions
How much more can a file room hold with mobile shelving?
Is the system powered?
Does mobile shelving need a raised sub-floor?
Is seismic anchorage required in California?
How long does installation take?
Can the delivery be timed to an office build-out?
Will it look like warehouse shelving in an office?
What holds the files upright on an open shelf?
File room too small for the paper your practice actually keeps?
Send us the room dimensions and a rough count of filing inches, and we will lay out a high-density system that fits the space you already lease, including the engineering your jurisdiction requires.