Saving Millions of Trees
Where does paper come from? Does it flit down from the heavens delicately like a cavalcade of birds designed for secretarial work? Of course not; it’s sourced from trees. And it’s used a limited amount of time, then thrown away.
Certainly it’s recycled sometimes, but it’s wasted a lot more than it ought to be. While this was a necessary collateral loss in the 20th century, it’s not anymore. Today, what used to require rental space and maintenance just to store can be maintained and stored in a drawer on your desk. Or even less—if you keep your information on the cloud, you don’t even need the drawer.
Between the digitization of information, the promulgation of the internet, and the rise of cloud computing, data acquisition, storage, transfer, and management has become more cost-effective and streamlined than ever.
It is literally a means by which quantities of trees that comprise entire forests worth of foliage can be saved—and that’s necessary, given that estimates put deforestation at a 46% loss since the dawn of man.
Yet somehow despite that, there are still many top-tier businesses who have yet to fully integrate their paperwork into a digital solution. Files are still sent between employees that require filling out and storage. What’s the point of that when you can keep an entire warehouse of information in the cellular device you carry in your pocket?
According to Liaison.com electronic data interchange, or EDI, represents substantial savings for businesses, because: “…an enterprise processing hundreds of thousands of supplier transactions per day can save billions of dollars by eliminating costs associated with the purchase, printing, handling, processing, and delivery of paper documents.”
Preserving Resources and the Environment
It’s not just that you can save exceptional assets that would normally be expended on paper. You’re actually lowering the environmental footprint of your business, which is good for the environment overall. EDI is trending because it saves money and the planet; but there’s even a third category of possible savings some miss: time.
It takes time to walk a file from point “A” to point “B”. Say that time is only twenty seconds per employee in a floor with fifty of them. That’s 1,000 seconds, or over 16 minutes. Imagine if a secretary has to dispense such information five or six times in a day. That would be about 80 minutes on a daily basis. During a workweek, that’s 400 minutes; 1,600 in a month.
Ultimately you’re looking at 320 hours a year. At only $15 an hour, that’s $4,800 in time lost annually. If you have multiple paperwork applications, you’re looking at expanded losses of this type. Meanwhile, an EDI application literally erases all those losses with the click of a button that sends an e-mail to all the necessary staff.
Additionally, with such protocols in place, you can be sure that employees receive information. You can tell whether or not the e-mail has gone to their box, and using such means streamline services. When all is said and done, not making the EDI upgrade will ultimately cost you; and this is entirely unnecessary.