You don't have to be a tree-hugging hippy to realize the importance of reducing your office's paper usage and waste. The practical reality is that by reducing office waste, you can reduce costs (beyond just the cost of the paper) and help your office become more organized and efficient. 360 PSG can help you automate some of your online tasks. So how do you do it?

Forms, forms and more forms

How many paper forms does your office have and process regularly? Where and how are they stored? If an employee from office A needs a form from office B, how do they access it? It never ceases to amaze me when I hear horror stories of important paper forms getting lost or it taking days to input the paper form into some software program. What is even more amazing to me is when I hear stories of web forms (placed online in an effort to reduce waste) being sent to an email box and then being printed off every time it is needed.

A good audit of your paper forms may be in order. A general rule of thumb is that if a form does not require a signature, it can and should be placed online. (Even if it does require a signature, it still can be placed online however it most likely will be printed at some point). The information that is submitted from your online forms should be stored in a way that can easily be retrieved. This can be through a web storage interface, emailed as an attachment, or at least easily be cut & pasted from the email text into a digital document. This will save in two ways: the cost of the physical form having to be printed and the sanity of your employees when they know where the file is located when they need it.

Where did that file go that was on my desk?

Are there physical files that your company needs to access regularly? What about files that need to be accessed by clients? It is becoming the norm to have a central file repository that exists in a web application that can be accessed from anywhere.

Why the web and not just a shared network directory? Accessibility. Having your files located on the web, you can easily grab the file you need from anywhere that has an internet connection (home, a client's office, etc.). Also, if a client needs to have access to certain files, a central system can organize them and allow for the same convenience of on-demand access.

Streamline Process

360 PSG constantly examines processes to determine whether or not we can help to streamline a tedious task with a web application. On one recent project 360 PSG helped one of our clients take a manual process that involved paper notes from various employees that were combined into a spreadsheet that was then printed out. By reviewing the process we determined that the entries could be done through a web interface and that the final document could be auto-generated. It was still printed in the end (unfortunately emailing was not an option...yet), but the updated process saved days of work and reduced at least the initial paper waste.

It is important to regularly review your repetitive processes and determine if there is a way to automate them and whether or not you can offload work to a software application.

What else can be done?

Here are a couple of other ideas to reduce paper waste:

• Adopt a policy to discourage printing for no reason.

• Encourage your staff or colleagues to forward useful (and not useful) emails instead of printing them and posting them on the wall.

• Bookmark interesting web pages to view at a later time, or email yourself the link.

• Create a pile of scrap paper that can be used to print on the back of.

• Play Sudoku or crosswords puzzles online.

I should note that I don't fully agree with the idea of a completely 'paperless office.' Every organization has files, folders and forms that need to be in a hard copy form. In some cases it is easier and more useful to have files in a physical format. The idea though is that there are too many benefits to reducing paper usage to NOT make an effort. So whether you do it for the good of the environment or for your own selfish penny-pinching needs, the results are still the same... win-win.