As many of you know, we have recently undergone a major conversion of our systems here at NPower Indiana (hence the dropoff in blogging!)
The process is going very well, but there are always opportunities for improvement. After our first round of billing via the new system, I received a call from a member saying, “everything looks OK, but how about saving a few trees?”
She thought we were being wasteful with paper.
Now, given all the things I was focused on in this new system conversion, paper conservation was admittedly not at the top of my list of priorities. Making sure we continue to record our time and bill our customers accurately was overwhelmingly more important to me. But now, with that part taken care of, the suggestion can be examined. And since I fundamentally agree that we shouldn’t be wasteful, I decided to dive in last night.
To begin, I looked at the copies of the invoices from last month and counted the number of pages printed: 53 invoices and an average of 3 pages per invoice – that’s 159 sheets of paper.
I decided that we might be able to adjust our billing templates, which consisted of me:
* Adjusting the spacing, margins and page orientation
* Adding a new category of information to the invoice (another member request)
But during that process, something terrific happened.
I realized that one of our more time-consuming steps could be eliminated while reducing the amount of paper being used. That’s a double-win in my book. So after doing all the analysis, the suggestion saved us (and the environment) just over a ream of paper a year – that may not seem like a lot, but it’s good for the environment and good for our finances. And as an added bonus, we’ve saved about a half-an-hour each month in our billing process.
And who couldn’t use an extra half-an-hour these days?
Keep those suggestions coming! Who knows what we’ll discover next.
