Be Green and Sustainable Using Digital Document Management and MPS

Since 1970, April 22 has been recognized as Earth Day around the world to raise public and corporate consciousness about environmental pollution, clean energy, global warming, and climate change. As this awareness has grown, firms have increased their daily efforts to reduce paper consumption, as well as reuse and recycle materials used in the office, making these regular parts of their green and sustainability goals. While a paper-free office won’t exist for some time, there are ways an organization can be green and sustainable using digital document management and managed print services (MPS) to efficiently manage their document flows within their business.

Digital transformation and business process automation are important initiatives for many organizations and have been well underway for some time. However, paper forms and documents are still prevalent in many core business processes. U.S. firms spend billions of dollars each year on printed forms, with most of these forms becoming obsolete in only a few months, and up to 70% of office space dedicated to filing and storage of documents. That presents environmental impact challenges from wasted energy, wasted paper, and wasted ink. It also means higher costs for energy, paper, supplies, and facility space, as well as lower employee productivity as workers spend time creating, manually handling, filing, and finding documents. Here are some things a firm can do to be green and sustainable using digital document management:

• Identify paper-intensive business processes, the forms and documents that are used in the process, and their role in the overall process workflow.
• Review whether forms or documents are printed then filled out manually, or filled out online then printed — if so, consider digitizing those steps and never printing the form or document.
• Digitize and automate as much or all the business process workflow as possible to eliminate the costly printing of documents and time-consuming manual reviews, approvals, and signatures.
• For existing hard copy documents or those hard copies received by the firm, use a multifunctional device (MFD) or scanner to scan them directly into a digital workflow or digital document management system (DMS)/content management system (CMS) for storage.

Intelligently using DMS, CMS, and digital workflow solutions can decrease the amount of paper a firm uses, reducing environmental impacts and lowering overall operation costs.

Though digital transformation is underway, paper is considered an important part of business for the vast majority of U.S. firms, and office printing continues to be required. Actively managing office printing using an MPS solution can help a firm also achieve its reduce, reuse, and recycle goals. Here are a few ways MPS helps a firm be green and sustainable even while printing documents:

• Monitor the amount of printing done in a firm and provide detailed reporting on the total print and paper consumption by the firm, department, by individual print device or by individual users, giving valuable information for decision making to gain control over the amount of printing done and paper used.
• Enforce user authentication and secure pull print to keep unauthorized users from printing and to reduce or eliminate wasted prints — up to 15% of pages or more are never picked up at a printer, which leads to unnecessary and costly waste, and is also a security hazard.
• Make sure duplex printing is set as a default for all users and devices – duplexing can save between 30-50% of paper costs to an organization.
• Automate supplies replenishment and ink bottle or toner cartridge recycling.
• Engage proactive/predictive servicing to ensure print devices are always maintained to optimal performance levels minimizing employee interventions and downtime.
• Ensure that the most energy-efficient print devices are deployed, and energy-saving features are enabled to reduce energy usage and costs.
• Facilitate a secure and environmentally friendly way of disposing of hardware at the end of its life.

Whether the goals are reducing deforestation caused by paper manufacturing, saving operational energy costs, or lowering the climate impact caused by the transportation of paper, ink, or toner, digital content management systems, printers, and MFDs are valuable tools in helping an organization be green and sustainable. The digital workflow and MPS professionals at Centric Business Systems can help any firm maximize all areas of document management and office printing to reduce its carbon footprint. Visit us at www.centricbiz.com or contact us at (877) 902-3301 for a complimentary consultation.