Michelle White spends a lot of time thinking about paper.
As the director of sustainability for Indigo, her duties include finding ways to reduce paper consumption at a company that makes most of its money selling books made of, yes, paper.
“We're cognizant that paper is used internally and in the books on our shelves,” Ms. White says, noting that the company has embarked on a broad paper-reduction strategy.
Last spring, the company instituted a program that aims to reduce internal paper consumption by 25 per cent by 2012.
Indigo's relationship with paper may be unique, but its drive to reduce the use and waste of paper isn't. Workplaces have been thinking about how to achieve the mythical “paperless office” for decades, albeit with little success. In 1975, Xerox engineer George Pake told BusinessWeek that future office desks would include a “TV-display terminal with keyboard” that could call up reams of documents, files, mail and messages. “I don't know how much hard copy [paper] I'll want in this world,” he said.
As it turns out, we can't get enough of it. Statistics Canada reported in 2006 that Canadians' paper consumption “more than doubled between 1983 and 2003” and that “the production and use of paper products is at an all-time high.”
Environmental and cost concerns have made paper reduction more of a priority in workplaces both large and small, and companies are turning to a variety of new technologies and services to meet their goals. Little by little, offices are digitizing their paper-based processes and documents.
Two weeks ago, Indigo offered employees at its head office the option of receiving their pay statements electronically. So far, about 35 per cent of staff have signed up. Ms. White says the company would save 156,000 sheets of paper and envelopes every year if all employees joined the program.
Indigo's IT department is also using a Web-based timesheet service offered by Nexonia, a Toronto company, to help get rid of paper timesheets. Instead of having IT staff fill out paper timesheets and submit them to a supervisor for review and approval, employees fill out an online timesheet that is automatically routed to their supervisor and archived by Nexonia.
Neil Wainwright, founder and CEO of Nexonia, says it's a challenge to wean people off paper, but the technology is improving.
“We've all been working with paper since we were born,” he says. “We know how to shuffle, stack and file it. To deal with the same information electronically, and in a way that works for people, is a challenge.”
Nexonia is one of many companies pitching go-paperless solutions. In the United States, Earth Class Mail receives your snail mail and then scans and e-mails it to you so you can decide whether to have the company e-mail the contents, shred the letter, or ship it directly to you. (It currently only offers P.O boxes in the U.S. and some European countries.) Another company, Shoeboxed, will scan, categorize and digitally archive all of a company's paper receipts. Apart from these offerings, most cable, phone and cellphone companies now offer electronic billing via e-mail. Some also charge customers a fee for paper billing.
In addition to its timesheet product, Nexonia offers a Web-based service for managing expense reports. Before it started using the system in 2007, Tarkett, a flooring company based in Farnham, Que., held on to 12 years worth of paper expense reports in order to comply with relevant laws. As a result, the entire fifth floor of its offices is taken up by paper archives.
Today, its sales team of roughly 250 people all over North America either scan or take a digital photo of their receipts and attach those to an online expense report. From there, it goes to their supervisor for online approval and then archiving.
