Go Green with ECM

According to a study carried out by document management software company, V1 this year, 95% of finance professionals are looking to electronic document management to support their green agenda.

The research was carried out with 120 senior finance professionals across a range of UK public and private sector organisations.

The survey indicated a strong interest in environmental awareness, revealing that 88% of organisations are concerned about their impact on the environment. 89% said that the business benefits of going green are still a key consideration. Almost 10% revealed that it is more important than ever for their organisation to consider environmental benefits during the buying process.

Enterprise Content Management (ECM), born out of document management principles, support green initiatives and provides the ability to reduce paper consumption. Going ‘paperless,’ is unattainable for most businesses. However, taking steps to reduce paper consumption, can help to reduce C02 (carbon dioxide) emissions, and benefit your bottom line. ECM solutions allow documents to be processed, managed and stored electronically, which significantly reduces the amount of paper the average worker consumes each day.

Greg Littlechild, ECM Consultant at Collate Business Systems said: “we are finding many organisations are investing in ECM as a way of increasing efficiency and eliminating paper based processes. Increasingly, these businesses are also seeing significant environmental benefits.”

Greg continues “compared to electronic processes, processing paper documents is slow and expensive. By digitising document-driven business processes, ECM solutions makes smart business sense as it reduces paper consumption and CO2 emissions.”

Past studies have also shown that the average document in an organisation is photocopied 19 times. ECM solutions allow organisations to distribute electronic documents securely via intranets, extranets and a broadband connection. The more work organisations perform online, the shorter paper trail and the less waste produced. Additionally, this real-time 24/7 access enables employees to review, approve or collaborate on documents without printing or shipping.

Have you implemented a document management solution? We’d love to hear your experiences of how this has supported your goals.

If you’d like to speak to Greg Littlechild, ECM Consultant at Collate about how an ECM solution you can support your environmental agenda, contact us today.