Growing the Top Line While Going Green
Improve Efficiencies and Profitability While Meeting Your Sustainability Goals

Many businesses today are focusing on how to maintain healthy profit margins in a challenging economic climate, and consequently business leaders and department managers are looking for ways to cut spending and reduce overhead.

There used to be an assumption that green initiatives would fall by the wayside when budgets got tightened. However, today there is compelling data that demonstrates how using ECM to electronically manage documents and business processes has enabled dramatic cost control by boosting productivity and minimizing the use of paper, energy, shipping, commuting and physical file storage. This not only helps companies operate in a "greener" fashion, but also improves both the top and the bottom line.

Here are a few examples:

1. The local government of the London borough of Islington (LBI) used ECM to deliver "online self service" that enables community members to access information and forms quickly and easily. The government agency’s goals were to transform the way they stored and accessed information in order to comply with the UK’s Freedom of Information Act, and to operate in an environmentally friendly way. Within the first year of deployment, more than 1.2 million documents were hosted on their ECM server, and both citizens and LBI employees could look up permits, licenses and certificates online, which created tremendous benefits:

• Improved consistency and accuracy—zero risk of misfiling, losing or destroying paper files;
• Saved 12 square meters of space, costing £2,400 each year;
• Saved £6,000 per year per workspace for each employee that now could work from home;
• Eliminated commuting for some employees and many constituents, reducing greenhouse gases;
• Dramatically reduced the need to print documents, saving on paper, toner, energy, file storage space; and
• Saved a total of approximately £8 million the first year.

2. OwnerGUARD insurance services deployed an ECM solution to process its customers’ insurance claims. OwnerGUARD’s employees save, on average, three hours per day looking up information because now it’s all immediately searchable and accessible with a few clicks of a mouse. The company shortened customer response times and can now process more claims each
day, while simultaneously improving customer satisfaction. OwnerGUARD saves $8,000—$10,000 per month on paper and toner costs and projects a savings of more than $12,000 by eliminating the need for physical file storage over the next three years. So the company has saved significantly, improved customer service and satisfaction rates and boosted employee productivity, all while saving tremendous amounts of paper and operating in a "greener" fashion

3. The Nevada County, CA, Citizen’s Information organization uses an ECM system as a portal to help it achieve its sustainability goals. By eliminating the need for people to drive to the county offices to get information, it reduced emissions by 7.5 tons and eliminated nearly 3 million miles of wear and tear on local roads and highways in the first year.

4. The Wilkes-Barre school district in Pennsylvania used its ECM system to digitize student registration and allow parents to provide student information online rather than on paper. This process enabled the district to decrease the time required to register each student from two weeks to 30 minutes. It freed up the staff’s time so people could work on more important issues, and it saved so much paper that it was able to cancel its plans to build additional document storage space. So the school district saved substantial amounts of time and money while significantly reducing its carbon footprint.

ECM Helps Position Companies for a More Profitable Future
An easy-to-use and deploy ECM system is an important component to improving business processes and saving resources without sacrificing sustainability initiatives. Company team members work more productively, with more flexibility, and customers or constituents are more satisfied because they are serviced quickly and accurately. And, being a green organization enables companies to be considered for new business opportunities with a growing amount of customers that only work with eco-friendly companies.

Organizations today are faced with many challenges, but operating more efficiently and saving money while "going green" doesn’t have to be one of them.

Going Green Facts

• The average worker prints 10,000 pages per year and wastes 1,410 pages;^{1, 2}
• The average cost of a wasted page is six cents;¹
• A company with 500 employees spends $42,000 on wasted prints each year;
• Only 49% of office workers say they recycle at work;³
• Every ton of recycled paper saves 3.3 cubic yards of landfill space;⁴ and
• It takes 10 times more energy to manufacture a piece of paper than to create another print or copy.⁵