One of our core objectives at Builtron Ltd (www.builtron.com) is to produce engineering designs that are environmentally friendly and sustainable. Sometime in June last year, we took the decision to switch to a paperless Office. Apart from the obvious advantages (savings in finance and storage space), we thought this was an also an excellent opportunity to make an environmental statement. According to www.epa.gov an average office worker uses about 10,000 sheets of paper a year, which is about 3 trees. The logic was quite simple; saving paper will save trees, which will in turn save the ozone layer etc.
The decision to go paperless was actually the easiest part of the process. Implementation wasn’t that easy. We had drawings, receipts, invoices etc. that we had piled up over several years that had to be digitized. Our office scanner was an A4 size and with some of the drawings as large A1 paper size that was a considerable challenge. The solution? We out-sourced. We got a guy who could scan the drawings in small bits and digitally stich them together. An A1 drawing was scanned into 8 different pieces on the A4 Scanner and joined together on the PC. The files were stored as JPEG and PNG and this allowed them to be stored and retrieved easily.
For an office of less than 10 workers, it was much easier for all of us to buy into the idea. We put up small notices at different parts of the office, reminding each other why we needed to do this and the benefits. One sign for example will ask “Do you really need to print out this e-mail?” and another read “Saving Paper or planting a tree, choose one” and another also read “Preview your document on the monitor, not on Paper”. At our weekly office meetings on Fridays, we discussed some of the problems we had faced during the implementation, and how they could be solved and how much money we, as a business, had saved. It was much easier for the staff to feel the impact once it had been quantified. The money we had saved, which initially wasn’t big was shared equally amongst the staff, to keep motivation up.
One major problem we faced was with storage and with and having an access trail. We needed to now who accessed what Document and when. Our initial thoughts were to buy and install a file server, but a quotation from IPMC and Atlantic computers quickly changed our minds. We also did not have the requisite IT knowledge in-house and we were not interested in hiring some body new. That was when we discovered Google apps. This was a free service from Google that allowed us to save our documents in the internet cloud, and install additional softwares (or services as Google called them) that took care of our accounting, document sharing etc. The major drawback to the adoption of Google apps is that we had to be online but with relatively cheap data services and plans from all the major Mobile Networks, we could access all documents and e-mails on the road.
Another free service from Adobe, right signature, and openCA allowed us to digitally sign our documents and emails. This took care of the traditional office stamp and ensured that all documents, drawings, invoices, emails etc. we sent out had our digital signatures and could be trusted.
We are still not at the point where we can completely discard papers in our day to day transactions but when the need to print arises we make sure we use paper that has been clearly labeled as made from recycled paper. So has the switch been worthwhile? That will be a definite yes! Knowing how many trees we have saved since the switch began always puts a smile on my face.
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This post first appeared on Energy And Environmental Issues In Ghana, please read the originial post: here
