How Businesses Can Use Document Digitisation to Improve Sustainability

How Businesses Can Use Document Digitisation to Improve Sustainability

2020 / By

Why should businesses aim to be more sustainable?

Did you know that more than 70% of today’s businesses would fail within three weeks if they suffered a loss of paper-based records?

We should all be aware of the huge role that paper usage has on the environment. Once paper is used and no longer needed it is sent to a landfill or incinerated by reducing the amount of paper we use as a business we help to reduce carbon emissions and waste.

A large reduction in waste would mean less pollution which would be made through fewer deliveries and less packaging which results in a more efficient procurement process. The cost of sending invoices can then be cut by upwards of 40-80%, this makes a significant saving!

At B2BE we are excited to move towards a more sustainable way of working, the content below shows how we plan to make more sustainable ventures within our industry.

Why do we automate documents?

  • Automating allows manual touchpoints that means you can deliver invoices by mail
  • The average document is printed five times. This can be reduced significantly through automation as they can be displayed, viewed and recorded digitally.
  • When documents are lost, it can cost between $350 to $700 and it can also help reduce the over-reliance of paper.
  • Reduces carbon footprint and operating costs by reducing these labour and paper-intensive functions.

Benefits of being sustainable

  • Reduction in routing and circulation costs for invoice approval.
  • Reduces errors and exceptions, whilst increasing the capture of trade discounts due to faster processing and approval.
  • Produces a diverse source of innovation and economic opportunity.
  • It establishes a robust reliable data gathering system that engages multiple levels of information technology.
  • Delivering 100% of your invoices to customers electronically.
  • Increase in compliance with audit requirements.
  • Improve relations with suppliers with highly efficient processes.

Reducing c02 emissions

  • According to NASA the latest measurement of c02 was 413 ppm, you can visit the NASA website looking at the global climate and see how significantly this has changed between 2002 -2016 alone. To control this, more sustainable options must be adopted.
  • Increased paper usage and waste contribute highly to co2 emissions.
  • Minimise the amount of waste sent to landfill, by considering the environmental performance of the supplier, as both the product and packaging materials should be minimized to prevent waste as much as possible.

Environmental saving made over the past 12 months, as of Feb. 2020

  • 90, 216, 167 documents are no longer printed – these are anything from e-catalogs to invoices, etc.
  • 238, 172 reductions in co2/kg emissions.
  • 10, 826 trees saved throughout the last twelve months through digitising documents.

This can all be seen in real-time via our home page also showing the companies, trading relationships, and countries served.

Why we offer a sustainable solution

  • We offer a multitude of digital solutions that reduce the need for manual processing, which include procurement, e-invoicing, document distributions, and accounts payable automation. You can read further into this on our Digitisation Product Page.
  • Produces efficiency gains and saves money, producing fewer errors, and creates an overall operational improvement.
  • Through new sustainable suppliers can be connected to meaning connecting to companies that share our values.
  • In 2018 only 20% of sustainability professionals believe their companies’ efforts to integrate sustainability processes in their supply chains to be effective. We firmly believe integrating sustainability within all our products and solutions and that digitisation will be more efficient for B2Be as a company and all our suppliers and clients alike.

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