Ingenuity and creative thinking will allow your organisation to save on overheads and reduce your environmental impact
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1. How not to pay for office
supplies and reduce your
carbon footprint
2. It’s the problem every member of staff has to deal with at some
time.
You’ve run out of post-it notes, the stapler’s empty and the
photocopier is so running dry of toner the latest reports look
like they were faxed from the moon.
3. There’s an issue though; the cost centre
for the office is nearly the budget and
there are still a few months to go
before the end of the financial year,
how do we handle this particular
conundrum?
4. When I worked in the accounts department within BT a good two
decades ago, we came up with a sneaky and yet utterly
watertight system that meant we didn’t have to worry about
stationery costs ever again.
You’d expect it, there were five of us working
on this particular scheme and that’s two more
than the witches in Macbeth, we had this
wrapped up.
5. Thing is; we were creating reports, huge reports, for other departments.
For example, the production department needed about five reams
worth of paper to create all the monthly reports they wanted.
That’s a lot of paper, we had six other departments with similar
requirements, and that meant at the beginning of the month we were
working through boxes of the stuff in order to supply essential reports.
6. I guess you can see the glaringly obvious solution? We simply asked each
department to either pay out of their budget for the paper they
required or deliver that amount of paper to the print room each
month.
Yes, we had a print room. In those days our main printer was the size of
your boardroom and sounded like the end of Heathrow runway.
7. The results?
It was stunning the difference this made not only to our
costs, but also to the amount of stationery eventually
used. You see, when the departments could see that all of
their reports were costing them to print out, they began to
reduce the requirements.
No longer were they printing off pages and pages of reports;
they were now quite happy to view much of the data on
computers.
8. We, in fact, managed to reduce the overall paper budget alone
by 15% in one year.
But then we went further by charging for toner, staples, binders
and everything else. As soon as the individual departments
saw there was a cost to the things they were used to having for
free, the requirement to have them suddenly dropped.
9. The moral of this story?
If you want to reduce costs and save the
environment, let every department
know how much it costs.
Give them a budget and challenge them
to stay within it.
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