Do your document solutions save trees?

April 3, 2008 · Filed Under Business, Culture, EDM, Technology 

Over at Office Product News, they just posted an press release from Laserfiche® stating the company helped some 25,000 organizations save 117 million trees? The release reads as follows:

Conservatively, Laserfiche estimates that the installation of its enterprise software has resulted in the elimination of 500,000 pages of paper documents, on average, in each organization—or some 1 trillion pages total. Some organizations save much more—for example, the Department of Immigration in Mexico has used Laserfiche to digitize more than 200 million documents.

Really? Conservatively speaking if the the company helped the Department of Immigration in Mexico digitize more than 200 million documents, wouldn’t that indicate they “scanned” 200 million documents? Help me out here, but just because you help “digitize” pages doesn’t indicate you are actually saving any paper - does it?

Sure, a sane person thinking of copying technology might argue that they saved on someone not making copies. I would concede this small point. But what about printing?

According to Gartner (see my article: ‘Are you still trying to sell hardware?’), printing volumes are on the rise while copying volumes are on the decline.

The printed page is increasing at an estimated 11% per year with 2006 volumes at somewhere close to 3500 billion pages (courtesy of Gartner via Jim Salzer over at DocuAudit International).

So if printing volumes are increasing, where is that coming from? I did some digging and came across a Laserfiche® authorized reseller Bits and Bytes Document Solutions who had this to say:

How many times is a document printed? The average document is printed almost 20 times*… When you think of paper output you usually think of printing. Printing is one of the most undocumented expenses in an organization.

BBDS didn’t have any sources listed, but overall they seem to be employing a very similar consultative strategy that I have used as well, and it is not ‘evil’ in the least. In fact, it seeks to help the customers gain control of their document life cycle - from inception to destruction. But let me tune you into a little secret here folks, why do you think ‘copier dealers’ are so tuned into wanting to sell EDMS solutions?

If you put the information from Gartner together with the information posted on BBDS’s website, where does this lead you?

Let me tell you printing is going up as more documents are being captured in information portal solutions simply because people don’t need to “keep the copy” in the file cabinet; they can find the ‘original’ in e-mail, on Google, and in their EDMS solution. Some images are simply viewed of course, but many people print their documents on-demand from their information portal of choice and throw them away. Better yet, they can recycle it, and feel better about themselves for saving a tree too.

* For those familiar with CDIA+ certifications, the training material for this certifcation states a document is reproduced up to 16 times.
  • Are You Still Trying to Sell Hardware?
  • Crossing the Document Output Divide
  • Are You Selling Problems or Solutions?

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