8 Document Management Practices that are Cost-Effective and Eco-Friendly

Our guest “8 things” blogger today is Ken Neal, a Certified Enterprise Content Management Practitioner and Director of Corporate Communications, for Océ Business Services. Océ Business Services provides document management and electronic discovery services to law firms, corporations, and the public sector.  Océ Business Services is a leading international provider of document process outsourcing services and technology to businesses and the public sector.  To learn more, visit http://www.obs-innovation.com. Ken can be reached at [email protected].

If you have not yet visited AIIM’s Green Microsite, it’s a good source of information for best practices related to Green ECM. 

8 Document Management Practices that are Cost-Effective and Eco-Friendly

As leading economic indicators continue to signal a global economic slowdown, companies are looking for effective steps to take – such as lowering costs and streamlining operations – in order to weather the storm and achieve a competitive edge in the eventual recovery. At the same time, recent industry research shows that businesses also want to be more environmentally responsible.

There are several document management practices that can help companies reach both their environmental and cost-reduction goals. From the sustainability perspective, these practices can significantly reduce the use of paper, thereby saving trees, gas in shipping the paper, physical space to store it, and halting the eventual destruction of many files that end up in a landfill. According to the Environmental Paper Network, “If, for example, the United States cut its office paper use by roughly 10 percent, or 540,000 tons, greenhouse gases would fall by 1.6 million tons. This is the equivalent of taking 280,000 cars off the road for a year.”

Here are eight guidelines highlighting document management practices in the office that can benefit the environment and reduce costs:

1. The workgroup alternative

To the extent possible, replacing personal desktop printers with workgroup MFPs (multifunction peripherals that combine print/copy/scan/fax functionality in one machine) shared by departments can have a strong positive impact. One financial services company replaced 1,100 copiers and printers and 1,000 fax machines with 400 MFPs. The initiative eliminated 1,700 machines that no longer consume resources based on their manufacture, transportation, operation, maintenance, and eventual disposal.

2. Adopt scanning practices

Instead of copying and storing physical documents, organizations can scan and store electronically. Employees can retain digital copies that they can distribute electronically, and at the same time avoid accumulating files filled with paper. 

As a conservative estimate, scanning can reduce paper consumption by one to three percent. In a recent industry survey, senior executives involved in document management indicated that document scanning has a high impact across the greatest range of business goals that include reducing costs, increasing competitive advantage, enhancing regulatory compliance, and improving customer service.

3. Default to duplex

Most multi-page documents don’t require the text to be printed on one side of the page. Newspapers, magazines and books use both sides (duplex printing). With effective fleet management it is possible to change office practices and make duplex printing of multi-page documents the norm. This can potentially decrease paper use by up to 50 percent.

4. Eliminate printing banner pages

A banner page is the extra page that prints before an employee’s file prints with username and machine name information. Gartner’s research estimates that organizations can reduce their consumables cost by up to 20 percent by eliminating banner pages from office print jobs. Banner pages can represent up to a quarter of pages printed for some typical office print jobs. A 1,000 person organization could cut up 1.6 million pages and save $33,500 per year by eliminating banner page printing (“Cost Cutting Initiatives for Office Printing,” Sharon McNee and Ken Weilerstein, Feb. 2008.)

5. Bulk up

Buying paper and toner in bulk can reduce transportation, packaging, and storage resources. Buying in bulk also often results in cost savings.

6. Leverage “smart” technologies

Enterprises can use MFP “smart” technologies such as Personal Mail Box, Fax-from-Desktop, Scan-to-Email/File Folder, and Document Routing in order to decrease paper and chemicals used in printing. This can reduce paper usage by up to three percent.

7. Implement user authentication

With as many as one in 10 documents sent to the printer and uncollected or sent again before collection to correct user errors, enterprises could reduce ad hoc print costs by up to 10 percent by implementing a PIN authentication system.

8. Put more text on each page

Paper usage can be reduced by changing a few default settings that will result in more text on each page. For example, in MS Word, you can go to “File,” then to “Page Setup” and set the margins to accommodate more text. Compared to the normal settings, this could use up to 14 percent less paper. Additionally, when printing, you can reduce font size to 10 point to decrease the amount of paper required.

Some additional posts that may be of interest:

1. Some musings about the future of ECM 
2. 8 things you need to know about using ECM for regulatory compliance 
3. 8 things small businesses need to know about document management 
4. 8 things you need to know about content classification and ECM 
5. 10 fast facts about document management    

Comments

[Jon Zalinski]

Thanks for a couple new points of view.

[Victoria Walmsley]

Crikey! These are some shameful stats. The amount of waste that's involved in processing paper documents is shocking. I've heard before that an average document photocopied 19 times. This is just unacceptable in this day and age. It's not just the cost issue - organisations need to realise the impact their activities have on the environment. There's no excuses anymore - technology is readily available to eliminate these wasteful activities.

[Mike Stokes]

What about using simple technology to cut printing costs?

There are a couple of vendors that provide tools that save a lot on printing costs by packing more on to each page and eliminating empty/waste pages: iPrint (http://www.clicktoconvert.com/iPrint/) and FinePrint (www.fineprint.com) are two such solutions.

Disclaimer: I work for iPrint.

It's past time when something like these tools were built in to every version of Windows shipped so they became part of everyones daily lives - it'd save planet a lot of trees and save a lot of toxic ink and toner.

[John Mancini]

You're right, Victoria. There is so much that can be done just by focusing on the role of paper. And the good thing is that it makes economic sense, too.

[Telemark]

And don't forget to use print preview before printing. This can save a lot of paper.