Enterprise Content Management (ECM) | Document Management | Capture and Imaging
Remember when placing the blue recycling bin next to the copier and encouraging employees to duplex their print jobs made you feel like you were doing your part to help the environment? The sustainability expectations set for corporations today have never been higher, and many are realizing that the benefits of going green with Enterprise Content Management (ECM) extend beyond being viewed as a good corporate citizen to significant cost savings and increased worker productivity.
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Paperless or Paper Light - A little goes a long way
At AIIM this year, we gathered industry analysts, press, and customers for an intimate discussion about the elusive paperless office and how even with the best ECM system, going completely paperless may not be a realistic goal for most companies. However, according to a 2007 State of the Paper Industry Report, the benefits of decreasing paper use slightly or going “paper light” should not be overlooked. In fact, 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 — equivalent to taking 280,000 cars off the road for a year.
Canada’s Niagara Catholic School District Board (NCSDB)’s implementation of an ECM solution proved just that. The school’s dependency on paper led to high transportation costs and a large carbon footprint as courier trucks drove around the district for daily pick-up and delivery to and from a central office. With its ECM system in place, NCSDB no longer needs to transport hard copies between various locations, in turn reducing wear and tear on local roads and cutting down of fuel usage and costs.
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Greening your office means more green on your balance sheet
The average office worker uses 10,000 sheets of copy paper each year and wastes about 1,410 of these pages. With the average cost of each wasted page being about six cents, a company with 500 employees could be spending $42,000 per year on wasted prints.
Direct cost and environmental savings will be immediately realized by driving paper out of core business processes and systems through the deployment of an ECM solution.
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Keep paper usage in check
An ECM system alone will not miraculously eliminate or decrease your paper consumption. Now that more people have access to each document than ever before, it will be important to set permissions that go beyond security access within your ECM system. Which documents should be print-friendly or read-only? Who needs to have access as an essential part of their business duties?
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Less filing cabinets could be the secret to lowering energy consumption
Filing cabinets do more than take up precious real estate. Offsite document storage spaces require additional costs to rent and energy to light, heat, and cool the facility.
California's Manteca Unified School District eliminated 200 filing cabinets by using ECM to store documents digitally, reducing the district’s energy consumption, freeing classroom space, and saving up to an estimated $400,000 in storage costs.
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You can go green using existing assets
It’s a misconception that when putting an ECM system in place to meet sustainability goals, you also have to buy expensive scanning equipment that consumes more energy or places wear and tear on the roadways being shipped to your office. You can use the multifunction printers currently available in your office to scan documents directly into your ECM solution without requiring a new investment.
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ECM makes telecommuting easier on employees and the environment
Many companies are moving toward 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 and reduce a substantial amount of waste.
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Keeping customers happy
Many customers are looking to do business with companies that are committed to sustainability. But using ECM to green your business will keep companies happy in more ways than one. The solution can unlock employee productivity and increase customer satisfaction by digitizing as much information as possible and letting employees collaborate more effectively. This not only pumps up productivity in the office, but also allows workers to better serve their customers by having important documents such as contracts, completed invoices, or customer service manuals at their fingertips.
Take OwnerGUARD Corporation, for example. Using an ECM solution, the company, a small insurance administrator, has reduced its turnaround times by 47 percent through scanning legacy documents into their system for fast and easy retrieval online - in turn providing quicker customer services and increased customer satisfaction rates.
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Don’t forget to connect the dots
An ECM solution is not going to impact your company’s green initiatives if no one is using it. Roll out new online workflows to all levels of your business and educate employees about ECM and its role in your organization’s overall document management strategy. It may be difficult to break paper-dependant workers of their printing habits, but once the benefits of ECM are understood, they will become more comfortable with electronic documents and more apt to take advantage of them.
ECM offers a real solution for any company looking to take its green initiatives to the next level. But the benefits can extend far beyond lighting the paper load and reducing emissions; it will increase the effectiveness of your core processes, which inevitability makes for a more profitable business.
