Green Office Blog

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.

As our business explores the concept and principles of One Planet Living, it is important to understand the science behind the strategy – ecological footprint.  Ecological footprint is the only metric that measures the demand we put on nature, and what nature can give us in return.  In other words, it measures how fast we consume resources and generate waste in comparison to how fast nature can absorb our waste and generate new resources for us to use. 

The office environment and the use of technology within, is rapidly changing and advancing year on year, and businesses are continually pressured to reduce operational costs, improve service levels and offer more products at a competitive rate.  

This has resulted in a high demand for Business Solution Providers that can offer holistic office solutions and expertise in all operational areas of businesses and can assist with making them operationally efficient and sustainable.

The human population’s appetite for relentlessly eating away at the Earth’s natural riches and resources is growing out of control. 

A report produced by the International Resource Panel, a component of the United Nations Environment Programme, indicated that rising consumption has resulted in resource extraction increasing from 22 billion tons in 1970 to 70 billion tons in 2010.   This means that the amount of the planet’s natural resources extracted for human use has tripled in the last 40 years.   The report warns that further increases in the use of natural resources will result in critical shortages of materials and an increase in the risk of human conflict.

‘Going green’, ‘eco-friendly’ and ‘sustainability’ are all buzz words in businesses these days.  We take advantage of daily conveniences, without always considering the impact it has on the Earth’s resources.  Since inception, Green Office has prided itself in prioritising the environment.