From eForms to Climate Change

One of the benefits of eForms over Paper Forms is a reduction in the use of paper (seems obvious). But when you look at how much of a climate change impact this can have – it’s surprising. Using data from the Environmental Protection Agency in Queensland Australia that using 1 ream of paper equates to 6% of a tree, 5.4kg of CO2 and 160 litres of water, Avoka have developed an eForm Benefits Calculator that calculates the environmental, cost and customer service benefits of replacing paper forms with eForms.

A core service offering from Avoka is the development of electronic forms (we call them “SmartForms“) … interactive PDF, Flash or HTML forms for structured data capture. Typically these SmartForms replace paper or static PDF forms within organizations and the clients for these solutions are medium-large businesses and Government agencies. They usually deal in tens, hundreds or thousands of different forms and many receive millions of form submissions each year.

Traditionally, the motivation for the creation of SmartForms is improvements to customer service, reductions in operating costs and increased revenue through improved sales order processing. But what about the environmental impact?

I received an email from the Environmental Protection Agency in Queensland Australia with one of those “think b4u print” messages at the bottom, which was backed up with data. Namely:

“Think B4U Print
1 ream of paper = 6% of a tree and 5.4kg CO2 in the atmosphere
3 sheets of A4 paper = 1 litre of water”

Based on this data, we decided it would be interesting to develop a calculator (eForm Benefits Calculator)  that provides estimates on the benefits to an organization when replacing paper forms with SmartForms…with the benefits grouped in to 3 distinct categories:

• Environmental Impact
• Cost Savings
• Customer Service improvements

Based on the user entering 2 pieces of information in the calculator

1. Forms – Number of forms processed per year
2. Pages – Average number of pages per form…

we calculate the savings as follows:

Environmental Impact:

Assuming the Forms x Pages = pages consumed, and a ream of paper = 500 pages. We calculate the amount of CO2 produced, number of trees removed from the environment and water consumed in the manufacturing of that total number of pages.

We then convert the water and trees in to CO2 figures as follows:

• Using 1,100 litres of water is equivalent to 1 kg of CO2 in to the atmosphere (not that water isn’t valuable in its own right)
• 1 tree can remove 3 kg of CO2 from the atmosphere per year

By brining all the environmental benefits back to a CO2 number, we can calculate a single Climate Change figure represented by the size of the Green Footprint – the more potential savings, the bigger the footprint.

Cost Savings:

Based on research from a business process outsourcing company on the operational cost of processing paper forms (e.g. data entry, rework due to missing information, searching for misplaced documents, etc) and using a flat fee of $40 per hour for administrative staff, we’ve calculated the work time that can be saved when an organisation avoids dealing with paper…no data entry, no rework, no misfiled documents, etc. This is shown as a straight annual dollar saving.

Customer Service:

Based on the same outsourcing company’s research into paper form processing, we’ve estimated the reduction in the processing time for a request initiated with a form. Given that 38% of paper forms have incorrect information or are missing required information (from the same outsourcing company study), organizations have to get back in touch with  the customer to get that information. When combined with data entry time etc. the total delays that can be avoided averages out to be 48 hours. So if your company operates 24×7, you can get back to a customer 2 days faster. If you operate 9 to 5, you can respond 6 days faster. This equates to more rapid customer service.

Summary

If your organization was to replace 500,000 form submissions with an average of 4 pages per form with eForms, the ANNUAL savings would be in the order of:

• 21,643 Kg of CO2
• 667,332 litres of water
• 240 trees
• $13m in operational costs
• Reduction in customer response times by 48 hours.

Try the calculator for yourself…

Note:

The calculator is not designed to be exact or exhaustive…it’s more of a rough estimate, but with some science to back it up. For example, we purposely haven’t factored in additional power usage requirements for filling in a form online using a computer as:

(a)    It is probably balanced by the power usage to download and print (printers are power hungry!) a static PDF from a website

(b)   Computers tend to be on during the day – this way they’re being used productively

(c)    Other savings like emissions associated with transporting paper in mail vans etc. haven’t been included

(d)   You get the picture…it gets complicated pretty quickly.

This is our first calculator and there’s probably room for refinement. We’d be happy to receive suggestions on enhancements – please post your suggestions here.