Green Office Blog

Written by James Tooley in collaboration with Wilma O'Neill

What are the main pain points for retailers when looking at managing their print environment?
When it comes to your print environment there are a lot of things to consider, but in retail there’s not always time to:

• Look for the best price
• Manage your hardware, contracts and stock
• While managing a store and trying to cut costs, you still need to find a way to be more sustainable.

Cost recovery in any business is essential. In law firms, it’s even more important to ensure that billable items land on clients’ invoices. Disbursements are often either manually tracked and billed, or it is isn’t recovered 100%. (This is an opportunity lost to generate an income for your business!)

Continuing our series exploring Bioregional’s ten principles of One Planet Living, the spotlight this month is on Land and Nature.  In having an academic background focused on the natural environment, this principle is close to my heart and promotes the protection and restoration of land and marine systems for the benefit of people and wildlife. 

This must be one of the most powerful talks I have attended as part of the EQ Entrepreneur Network Durban South Africa.

Richard’s talk was filled with valuable insights and statistics on the biggest health epidemic of the 21^st century: DEPRESSION.

I was amazed by this South African man who had accomplished so much. Richard’s credibility is backed up with an incredible track record where he has worked with some of the world’s best athletes and businesses.

The talk was split into two parts, the ‘cause of stress’ and ‘how to be exceptional’.

Hello Again and Green Greetings!

In our last blog engagement, we explored the “Typical challenges experienced in the Banking industry”.  We touched briefly on digital banking trends and the way forward for the banking industry following the challenges experienced from a Green Office perspective.

Digitization is the new buzz word within the FinTech industry with automation, efficiency and customer experience as the main drivers.  Within the banking industry the partnership between strategy and technology create a perfect platform for digitization.  The majority of customers are techno savvy and demand more streamlined processes from their banking service provider.  Their time is valuable, and they challenge the banking industry to move towards digital platforms or face the risk of losing their business to more progressive banking service providers.

Companies’ investment of R1.5 million on 4 Devices, could have potentially been R350k!

You really need to know and understand the rules of engagement of the Office Automation and Asset Financing World, as being aware of the detail can possibly save you millions!

In our world and our interaction with clients, we have accepted that the printing and print related contracts, are placed at the bottom of the food chain.  As specialist in our field, we believe that C levels in businesses should be aware of what’s going on. This information is not always filtered through the correct channels of the organisation, to ensure that contracts and pricing are properly reviewed, before it is signed.

Continuing our series exploring Bio regional’s ten principles of One Planet Living, the spotlight this month is on equity and local economy.  This principle is based on creating “safe, equitable places to live and work which support local prosperity and international fair trade”. 

The One Planet goals for equity and local economy include:

• To ensure diversity and equality of opportunity across gender, race, age, sexual orientation and disability.
• To create a vibrant and resilient economy where a significant proportion of money is spent locally.
• To pay all employees a living wage and avoid large income gaps.
• To ensure pensions and investments are managed responsibly.
• To conduct international trade fairly and without exploitation.

I have always loved the quote:
“The greatest gift you can give someone is the gift of inspiration.” - by Cornel West

Business owners are becoming more aware of the effect their activities are having on the environment, and because of this, people are showing a greater interest in transitioning from the ordinary, everyday, overdone corporate gifts to now gifting customers with gifts that have “a meaning”. What a better way to inspire your colleagues/clients to be sustainable than to gift them with an eco-friendly gift to remind them of the value of supporting brands that are socially and environmentally friendly.

The expectation to deliver on an effective and efficient print environment for customers is becoming more and more important, whether it is a big corporate business with almost 3 000 assets to keep track of, or a small church down the road relying on one device to do the job. No matter your business size, you will most likely need to invest in a reliable partner to manage your devices and office automation space.

It’s all good to manage print costs and have a strategy for going digital, however can you answer the question of why your people still print and what are they printing? We have found that understanding this can actually uncover areas of inefficiencies within your business.

Typically, businesses identify areas of inefficiencies by means of manual processes or escalations within a department or from clients, due to tasks being missed or not attended to. This is a top-down approach where the business would then identify the inefficient process and reach out to consultancies or technology firms to assist with the automation or digitization of this process.