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| Efficiency in four steps |
May 5, 2008 |
To create a greener office, start by measuring your footprint, and then act on the results
By Trevor Marshall
Offices generate enormous amounts of paper. The pencil pushers of the past have given way to keyboard jockeys, and “CTRL+P” remains a popular way to generate a backup of important files.
One would be forgiven for assuming that Xerox, a company synonymous with copying, is happy we are so quick to generate documents. Instead, the company is eager to help businesses reduce the number of print, copy and fax machines used and the mountains of paper they produce.
 Backbone sat down with Patricia Calkins, vice-president of environment, health and safety for Xerox, following a customer meeting in Toronto. Calkins has been holding such meetings across Canada to pass on advice about how companies can become greener. The biggest improvements, it turns out, come from changing corporate culture.
Backbone: The personal computer was supposed to give us the paperless office, but that didn’t happen, did it?
Calkins: In fact, it was the person who founded the Xerox research center in Palo Alto, Calif., who coined the term “paperless office.” He envisioned that, by this time, we would not be printing. But in fact printing has increased.
Backbone: But that’s changing now?
Calkins: In the past, because of the available technology and the way business processes worked, they were very paper intensive. As we help our customers improve the efficiency of these processes, some of that includes eliminating paper from the process.
If we think about it, if a process is inefficient there’s typically an environmental dimension associated with that, and if we drive out inefficiency we not only drive down our environmental footprint, but also deliver benefits to the bottom line. But because there wasn’t much awareness around this, even a few years ago, it was hard to connect. Fast forward to today: awareness has just exploded, both with respect to the seriousness of the environmental consequences of our actions and the tight linkage between that and economics, and the expectation that businesses and governments need to drive the solutions for ensuring sustainability.
Backbone: Can you explain this linkage?
Calkins: Xerox has studied a lot of document-intensive processes for our clients and we have found that for every two employees that have a computer, there’s a print device. And then we found that those devices are sitting idle for 98 to 99 per cent of the time.
We have found companies can reduce that ratio (of employees to printers) to 15:1 and significantly drive down their energy consumption. By shifting from personal printers and other single-function devices to a shared multifunction device, companies can reduce energy consumption by 50 per cent. In addition, by replacing older equipment with today’s EnergyStar devices, companies can drive down energy consumption by about 70 per cent. So there’s not only an environmental benefit, but a bottom-line benefit, too.
 Backbone: So what advice do you have for companies?
Calkins: We have learned there are four key dimensions. The first is quantitative: what gets measured gets managed. So we measure the current state and the costs associated with that. And it’s not just dollar impact. This is what surprises me lately. It used to be that our customers would ask, “What’s the bottom line?” But now people say to me, “We know what the financial benefits are—we need you to help us quantify the environmental benefits, because now our employees really want to understand that.” That’s what motivates them to pursue more optimization.
Number two is the value chain. Companies need to think beyond their own operations and remember that by reducing the environmental impact of their own products and services, that in turn drives environmental benefits up the supply chain. For Xerox to deliver its products and services to our customers, typically there are machines that are required, plus consumables and paper. To provide that machine we need to assemble it, fabricate parts, manufacture chemicals, extract raw materials from the earth and so on. For paper, it’s the same thing: there are chemicals to make and wood to harvest. There’s packaging, transportation and—everywhere—energy. So we look at this in terms of an environmental footprint. The first step is to ask, “What can I do in my own operation?” but also recognize that you have some influence within your own supply chain.
Backbone: And all of that costs money, right?
Calkins: That’s the third dimension. It has to be economically driven. It still surprises me that if something is environmentally preferable, people assume it’s automatically going to cost more. That’s not true, because if we improve the environmental performance we’re driving inefficiency out of the process—and inefficiency results in lost dollars.
But if we’re looking at the business case, we may have to look at it a little bit differently than how we normally would in an annual budgeting process. For example, if we’d simply looked at the cost of a part and went for the lowest cost provider, we never would have implemented our remanufacturing strategy in the 1990s because we needed to design a little more cost into the part in order to be able to reuse it a bunch of times. The economic win is that the part ends up costing us less over its life cycle.
Backbone: What’s the best way to introduce new, greener processes?
Calkins: That’s the fourth dimension: the quick hit. We recommend piloting a program so we can make sure we’ve worked out all the bugs in any new process before going forward with a full implementation. There have to be some easy wins, because if we can demonstrate an easy win it creates more enthusiasm to go further and to get more of the organization’s people involved. And when we get more people involved we can accomplish a lot more.
“It used to be that our customers would ask, ‘What’s the bottom line?’ But now people say to me, ‘We know what the financial benefits are—we need you to help us quantify the environmental benefits because now our employees really want to understand that.’”
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