Green Office Blog

It is imperative for businesses today to work in an optimal environment to increase efficiency. Office automation is one area in which a business can reduce costs and increase productivity significantly, provided you do your homework. Office Automation is critical for many businesses and because you are replacing many devices such as scanners, printers and multifunctional devices, the partner you choose becomes even more important.

Green Office’s mission is to make businesses efficient and sustainable, and what is important to remember is that these two terms are interlinked.  Moving towards a more sustainable business model will allow for the identification of inefficiencies within your business, thus reducing operational costs. 

Looking specifically at the print environment, Green Office has assisted their Managed Print Service (MPS) clients to do exactly that, by implementing various sustainability initiatives – reducing print volumes, reducing energy consumption, green procurement and printer cartridge recycling.

Last month, we looked at the first One Planet Living principle of living a happy and healthy life, with healthy food choices obviously being an important aspect to health.  However, there is more to food that we need to consider than just choosing to eat more fruit and vegetables – we need to understand where our food comes from to be sustainable.  This brings us onto the next One Planet Living principle, local and sustainable food.

Choosing local food has been gaining popularity for a while now with farmers markets becoming all the rage.  As consumers, we love the idea of knowing where our food comes from whilst engaging with and supporting local businesses.  We know that choosing local supports the local economy and uplifts and supports small scale farmers, but are we aware of what buying local does for the environment? 

It is not unlikely that most businesses do not know the number of printed pages they are currently generating or what their entire print environment is costing them.  It takes a lot of time and industry experts to inventory all the devices, analyse the related cost to each device and understand the current picture of the business environment.  If done properly, a print audit can be extremely helpful, as this critical information is used to measure the success and to identify opportunities to revitalise your print environment, reduce costs and improve end-user productivity.

The South African Financial Institutions are well known, as ambassadors for the country.  Their contributions in sport, art and education has made phenomenal strides in improving revenue and reputation, a mutual benefit for both the institutes and the country.  The major financial institutes share similar challenges within the core industry.

These are namely:

• Growth and market-share of the business and their portfolios,
• Creating or improving on their customer experience ie. customer relationship,
• Conquering new revenue streams, and last, but not least
• Digital Transformation of their legacy systems and moving towards a paperless environment

Despite the future vision the above challenges offer, printing is still a major focus despite its challenges for the majority of the financial institutes.  Even with the launch of the newer digital platform banks (as seen in the media - Tyme and Discovery Bank), many South Africans are very much loyal to the traditional financial houses.  Ergo, printing is and will still be a requirement for many years to come.

This question often comes up, and the answer to it is certainly yes. Your printing devices connect to nearly every device in your corporate network and most printers are not even designed with cyber security in mind. If hackers are hungry enough for information they will use any possible way to get “inside’’ your network. Their intent is to get access and control of your printer and from there your network. If they have access to the network, they will have control over your data.

The hackers want data that contains sensitive information that they can use to harm your company financially or place malicious software on your network to bring your business to its knees, harming your company’s IT infrastructure.

The first One Planet Living principle we will be exploring is health and happiness.  When thinking of the word “sustainability”, one doesn’t normally think about what we dish up on our dinner plates, or our wellbeing for that matter.  The reality is however, that a happy and healthy community is a sustainable one, and it’s no different with respect to happy and healthy employees contributing to a business’ sustainability.  This tends to be overlooked by employers, yet it is arguably one of the most important aspects to keeping customers happy – vital to any business’s success.  Consider the following benefits of ensuring that your employees are happy and healthy

How do you turn your business into a paperless environment? Is it as simple as stopping all printing and just doing everything digitally? What about storing and retrieving documents? The list of questions can get really long!

To address this challenge, Green Office’s Business Process Optimisation focuses on the following three steps:

Cost savings, greater efficiencies and sustainability are all synonymous with the South African market.  Most businesses are driving towards a leaner business that operates more efficiently while driving down operating costs.  Printing and its associated costs are no different.

In a modern-day business environment, these are some of the important steps on how one can effectively reduce the amount of spend within their printing environment.

Having a print management software to recover matter billing from your clients is no longer a pleasant option, but rather an essential part of your law firm’s IT toolkit.  However, although most firms recognise this need and the importance of this revenue stream, most aren’t sure what the best software is and how to go about it.

Let’s fix that.