How the right content management system can help you meet your sustainability goals while saving time and money
A while ago, going green was seen as a trendy thing for companies to do, with less attention paid to the true business impact it might bring. Times have changed. Today companies are finding real value in reducing their carbon footprint, including significant cost savings and increased worker productivity.
Impact on the environment can be minimized with the improvement of several business practices. Most of these can be identified simply by looking around your office and evaluating how workers use paper documents. Here are some statistics that paint the picture of several business practices and how workers use paper documents:
- The average office worker prints 10,000 pages per year and wastes 1,410 pages
- A company with 500 employees spends $42,000 on wasted prints per year.
- Only 49 percent of office workers say they recycle at work
- Every ton of recycled paper saves 3.3 cubic yards of landfill space
- It takes ten times more energy to manufacture a piece of paper than to create another print or copy
While going completely paperless isn’t a realistic goal for most companies, decreasing paper use or going “paper-light” is a strategy that reaps several positive results. In fact, for example if the U.S. cut its office paper use by roughly 10 percent, or 540,000 tons, greenhouse gas emissions would fall by 1.6 million tons. That would be the same as taking 280,000 cars off the road for a year.
Xerox is deploying a paper-light document management strategy not just about encouraging employees to print responsibly or to recycle more. The key to going paper-light is in transitioning paper documents into digital form and then archiving them so information can be found quickly and referenced, shared, or updated without the need for hard copies.
Through sound energy management, new and innovative manufacturing technologies, more efficient heating and cooling equipment in our facilities, and reducing the miles traveled by our service fleet, we have achieved an 18% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions since 2002.
An enterprise content management system can help companies easily transition from working in a mostly paper environment to a predominantly digital one. ECM systems also enable automated business processes that not only dramatically reduce consumption of paper, energy and materials, but also significantly decrease the amount of time it takes to get work done.
Implementing an ECM system as part of a company-wide sustainability effort results in many benefits:
- ECM Reduces Storage, Energy and Emissions: Gas emissions and transportation costs affiliated with the shipment of hard copy documents from multiple locations or to offsite storage spaces can be greatly reduced when using an ECM solution. Also, offsite document storage spaces require additional energy to light, heat and cool the facility, as well as for general upkeep.
- ECM Supports Telecommuting/Virtual Offices: Many companies are moving towards telecommuting policies that allow employees to have more flexibility or work entirely from home to lower the impact that commuting has on both the workers and the environment. An ECM system with an easy-to-use, secure, Web-based interface gives employees instant access to the information they need to complete their daily tasks from any location. Accessing documents outside of the office via the Web can also eliminate the need to print large amounts of information – reducing a substantial amount of waste.
Opting for a digital information portal also makes virtual teaming significantly easier. Colleagues across the hallway or across the globe are able to share business-critical information with each other – and with partners or clients – without mailing or faxing. In some cases, using an ECM system eliminates the need for a physical office, generating significant savings on energy and rent.
- ECM Increases Productivity and Customer Satisfaction while Decreasing Costs: Many companies have seen significant ROI by using an ECM system as part of their green strategy.
Businesses today are faced with many challenges, but going green doesn’t have to be one of them. A comprehensive ECM strategy can help your organization lower its impact on the environment and help build a more productive team and profitable future.
By incorporating procedures to reduce, reuse and recycle, offices of any size can help improve the health of the environment.
