Reducing your carbon footprint with an electronic DMS

Carbon Footprint is the amount of carbon or greenhouse gases produced as a result of our actions. An individual’s carbon footprint might be negligible in the grand scheme of things, however, that of a company compounds with every action they take.

While some companies have an unavoidably massive carbon footprint, like transportation companies, there is something every single company can do right away to help reduce our carbon footprint–go paperless. Here is how you can reduce your carbon footprint with an electronic DMS.

What is paperless?

“Paperless”, a term coined by a now-defunct company called Micronet, Inc. in 1978 means for an office to operate such that no paper is used in any process without compromising on operational efficiency. Going paperless saves time, and money and as a bonus, you save the Earth. That last bit is the wisest investment ever.

Some companies already have almost no dependency on paper, to begin with, like tech companies, but there are companies that depend almost entirely on the paperwork that could benefit from shifting their priorities to paperless, such businesses are:

Accounting
Law
Construction
Healthcare
Education

The problem with using paper is that

Every tree we cut down produces 12,500 sheets of paper (about 25 reams)
25% of solid landfill waste is comprised of paper waste (while organic, it is still too voluminous)
About 20% of documents are either misfiled or lost, i.e., paper is wasted
There is evidence suggesting over 40% of copies/prints are disposed of within 24 hours.

How many times have you taken out a print to realize that you misspelled someone’s name, or left in extra space and had to do it again? This expands the carbon footprint to no end.

Reduce your carbon footprint with an electronic DMS

Electronic DMS solutions free you from your dependence on paper for all your processes. While you could simply switch some processes over painlessly, like public announcements, inter-office memos, and the likes. However, some other facets are easier said than done, but not impossible. Especially when you realize that digitization is a one-time endeavor, and any cost you bear will be negated and recovered over time. For example, Yale’s school of medicine saved $92,000 when they stopped printing stacks of papers to iPads. They saved that much through that single item, that recovery grew even higher because they can do much more on a single iPad than thousands of sheets of paper. Not to mention the fortunes you’ll save by getting free of printer ink.

Other Advantages of a DMS

Going paperless isn’t going to be viable for your company if it ends up costing your operation in implementation and upgrade worries. So, we suggest checking out for some specific examples on how to go paperless.

Additionally, while we always maintain beliefs like, “no one can hack into a paper document”, there are digital solutions that make it more secure than any flimsy old piece of paper. However, if all your content is locked behind 256-bit bank-level encryption and all your content is transferred through SSL encryption, there is no way anyone is getting in without the proper authorization.

For companies that need to sift through large volumes of paperwork, going digital is even more critical as it would trim down the hundreds (possibly thousands) of human hours spent searching through documents with a single search string using a powerful OCR tool that can even pick up words from even scanned documents, photographs, and read-only documents like PDF files, and graphics.

This added with the ability to get DocuSign approvals from higher-ups either all at once or one-by-one, gives you the flexibility to operate as you see fit. You can even set folder visibility and access to whichever lever of users or user groups you wish.

All of the above is possible through Folderit.

Try Folderit DMS for Free!