Cost $aving Efficiencies for Your Firm

Posted by Trish on Feb 9, 2010 in General |

Double-Sided Printing & Recycling Your ‘Used’ Paper

These days most firms have instituted firm-wide ‘double-sided’ printing as a cost savings measure. Unfortunately, since many offices do not have the proper printing equipment in place, it is difficult to follow-through on this practice consistently, if at all.

It is not necessarily that the equipment in place cannot perform the double-sided printing function; the problem arises when the user has to print one side at a time, and be on stand-by to flip the paper over to print the second side, if and when the main photocopier is unavailable, assuming it supports this function.

I suggest to you that this method is not ‘time’ efficient, and it certainly does not save costs on your printer toner cartridges – whether you are printing to a network printer or the main photocopier. Of course, the loss of productive ‘time’ accumulates; therefore, I suggest not printing at all unless it is a real necessity.

If you absolutely must print, perhaps for proofreading purposes, use your printed paper from your ‘recycle tray’, (which should ideally be on your desktop), for part of your print job, and print the remaining pages double-sided.

If your company has a firm portal, it likely has ‘document sharing’ capabilities. Firms not currently using or providing this tool, could have their IT teams rectify the situation rather easily. Barring this facility, of course there is the Windows XP ‘Collaboration tool’, where your team can view and edit the documents on-screen, or if you are using 2007, you could save the document to ‘Office Live’ for future viewing and sharing in the document database.

Numerous methods are available for you, including Adobe Acrobat, but the point here remains that valuable time and money can be saved by not ‘printing’ documents out, and depleting both your paper stock and toners, particularly for colour print jobs.

Although it is a common request, Draft documents should not be printed in colour. Unfortunately, no consideration is given to the associated firm costs of colour printing for draft projects.

Recycling Products

If your firm thinks ‘Green’, you are likely already using recycled products such as photocopier and printing paper, toners, et cetera. In addition to these calculated savings, recycled ‘office products’ would also represent considerable savings for the firm.

Items such as binders, paper trays, staplers, and other ‘common stock’ items, can all be recycled and placed in a common area for easy staff access.

If research on various Office Supplies Vendors is conducted once or twice per year, it is probable that cost savings can be found in this area as well. Competition is fierce, and prices certainly do fluctuate throughout the course of a year.

Catering

Another area that would reduce costs substantially is Catering. Budget conscious firms are cutting down on their provision of morning pastries and afternoon snacks. I think this is a good thing because, once again, it is counter-productive.

If staff is going to the kitchen to get snacks, little chats will naturally ensue, taking even more valuable ‘production’ time away from the employee and the firm. In addition to this, employees are slowly, but surely, gaining unwanted pounds.

In terms of Catering, something to consider is cutting down on frequency and size of the catering orders. Most people do not require two sandwiches, salad, cookies, etc cetera. In addition, it may be prudent to look at restricting catering orders to ‘client’ only meetings.

Another way to cut costs is to use proper silverware and plates versus recycled paper products that are going to leave a mess and clog up your bins, not to mention once again, negatively impacting our forests.

Shredder Boxes

I would estimate that at least 75% of the paper in these boxes is only printed single sided, what a waste! Not only is it a waste of paper, it is also more expensive for your firm to have the Shred-It people, or whomever, to say, come in once per week, versus twice per month.

I would think that modifying the firm contract with the supplier would be a relatively easy exercise. If your firm is a large corporation, a ‘National’ account will sustain considerable savings for all offices.

Something to note here as well is the binding coils’ and ‘cerlox binding’ on finalized documents put into the shredder boxes. At least remove the ‘tabs and bindings’ for recycling first, which will also reduce costs for your firm.

Program Licences

If your firm wishes to implement a new office program to affect an increase in overall production efficiencies, perhaps your IT team could coordinate with your head office, to determine if there is supported interest in this product. If so, and the green light is given to IT to proceed in this purchase, the licensing costs should be substantially reduced.