How not to pay for office supplies
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How not to pay for office supplies and reduce your carbon footprint
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Ingenuity and creative thinking will allow your organisation to save on overheads and reduce your environmental impact See the original article at: http://www.theofficesuppliessupermarket.com/articles/how-not-to-pay-for-office-supplies-and-reduce-your-carbon-footprint
Transcript of How not to pay for office supplies
How not to pay for office supplies and reduce your
carbon footprint
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
