Green Office Blog

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.

South Africa is considered to be a water scarce country.  In fact, we are ranked as the 30^th driest country in the world, receiving an average of 450 mm rainfall per year compared to the global annual average of 870 mm.  Increasing population growth and climate change is sure to exacerbate this, as we have already witnessed with the severe droughts experienced in Cape Town in 2017/2018 where “day zero” was terrifyingly close to becoming a reality. 

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: