Building a greener office

Save Earth, Go green. The concerns of protecting the earth from destruction has become a part of all aspects of our life. Many of us are trying to promote greener environment in our everyday activities. Whether it be our houses, society or workplace the green campaign has reached an all time peak level of awareness.

Five interesting aspects to consider:

•80% of global warming is caused by carbon dioxide, according to the Carbon Trust.

•Envirowise.com states that waste costs money, typically up to 4% of business turnover and by finding ways to reduce waste, your company could become profitable.

• IBM has estimated a saving of $17.8 million in 1991 by encouraging employees worldwide to turn off office equipment and lights when not in use.

•The 1990s was declared as the warmest decade in the century . Most experts are in consensus that the reason behind hotter temperature is due to people burning  non renewable fuels like oil, coal and gas that emit heat-trapping, greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.

•On average, office equipment are responsible for 16% of an office’s energy use.

Just by practicing and implementing few eco friendly options within your office, you contribute your part for the environment. An office that decides to go greener using innovative IT products is on the winning edge.

Five IT products that can help in building a greener office include:

1. Office Portal
2. Scan Stations
3. Document Management System
4. Workflow based Business Process Automation
5. Web Marketing

Step 1: Office Portals

-          How do you manage your office announcements? Do you circulate individual memos?

-          How do you take care of the time management and the tasks management process? Do you maintain register and paper based application forms?

-          How do you issue your payroll statements? Do you print them?

Mass level communications can be implemented using an office portal. With an office portal in place you can set leave (time off rules), automate the leave process (approval and rejection), manage projects and tasks and measure performance using an intranet web based portal.

You ca also calculate payroll and generate e-statements that are issued to employees.

A company intranet portal is an easy way to take the first step to a greener office.

Step 2: Scan Stations

Even in situations where multiple people are working on the same document you do not need to have copies of documents to circulate. For instance, set up Scan Station software that can intelligently scan all hard copies and create digital copies which can then be shared within intranet.

ScanStation software is a good first step in eliminating a paper based environment and creating a greener environment. Work on digital documents till the end of task. And using electronic signatures, print only when a deal is signed.

Step 3: Document Management System

As you begin digitizing your documents and moving your company from a paper based environment to paperless environment, the managing of documents in a well structured manner is the next milestone. A well structured document management system with powerful indexing, full text search, inbuilt viewer, version control, security makes your office more efficient as well as more cost effective.

Step 4: Workflow Business Process Automation

The sharing of digitized documents can be efficiently handled using a document management system. Business process automation can be achieved where documents need be routed to officers based on pre-defined business process. This can be as easy as point-and-click.

Office workflows based on conditions, sequence can be automated with higher accuracy and speed. With proper alerts, escalations and triggers the automated office process makes your office greener in terms of delivery, performance, accuracy and return on investment (ROI).

Step 5: Web Marketing

According to Internet Usage and World Population Statistics (September 30, 2009), out of the world’s population of 6,767,805,208 about 1,733,993,741 are internet users which is about 25.62%. [ reference : http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats.htm ].

Web Marketing has been at the top of the news ever since social networking sites such as Linkedin™, Twitter™, FaceBook™ and Orkut™ became a part of the marketing campaigns of businesses of all size.

Simple Web tweets using twitter can update thousands connected to an enterprise. This approach is proving more effective than spending hundreds or thousands of dollars sending newsletters and snail mails.

A YouTube™ account with your product or company video works much better than a paper based advertisement which limits itself to static visuals with no audio or video. These videos can be presented in an attractive peer-to-peer fashion that fosters a sense of business community.

Just Five Steps will help move your company to a paperless environment, make your office greener; and you will be contributing to saving the environment. As an added benefit, ‘green’ almost always means a higher return on investments (ROI).

About the Author

Royson Rajan heads SoluSoft Technologies India as its Vice President, Engineering. With over 5 years of experience in business process automation, Rajan initiated the SoluSoft Go Green Technology Drive . This program has the goal of sowing the seeds of greener IT products, nurturing and cultivating a green consciousness to help offices reap the benefits of better ROI and a healthier planet.

Summary

In a business context, green equates with improved efficiency and bottom line results. In a personal context it means a healthier planet where our children will enjoy better and longer lives.