Last week I blogged that I will be attending Ricoh’s dealer conference, Convergence 2011. One of the main seminars is titled “Total Green Office Solution”. Thermocopy was chosen to provide a case study for this seminar due to our years of experience and commitment to educating businesses about best practices pertaining to environmental friendly business solutions. I have been asked to present the case study at one of the seminar sessions.

Through our Printworks+ program (this program provides an information management strategy for your business) we help businesses visualize their environmental footprints by assessing their work-flow and then customize environmentally-friendly solutions that meet their environmental goals while reducing the TCO (Total Cost of Ownership). The text of the case study follows:

Tindell’s Building Materials

Building a Green Future with Environmentally Friendly Ricoh Solutions

 Tindell’s Building Materials began in 1907 as a sawmill business. The company now owns and operates building materials sales and warehousing facilities in Knoxville, LaFollette, Oak Ridge, Sevierville, Maryville and Cleveland, Tennessee. These facilities include a truss manufacturing plant, a millwork division, an installed sales division and a commodity center. Tindell’s mission is to always set a new standard of excellence for its customers, employees and suppliers as the service and quality leader in the building materials industry by doing the right thing right the first time.

Tindell’s saw the market moving slowly toward a greener building environment when it started getting queries about how to build a greener product from the contractors it supplied. Because of that, several of the company’s employees obtained LEED certifications. LEED certification is the recognized standard for measuring building sustainability and achieving the certification is the best way to demonstrate that a building project is truly “green.”

The company also became FSC certified in an effort to lead its industry in environmental initiatives. FSC insists on rigorous tracking of certified products in order to carry the label. However, making a conscious effort to seek out and market green products didn’t stop with building materials. Tindell’s Building Materials viewed its efforts as a company-wide commitment that included green back-office solutions.

Challenge

As a fourth generation building materials business, Tindell’s Building Materials has evolved over the years, and currently has five retail stores that serve primarily the professional contractor.

“In the last three years, we’ve made a lot of changes due to the state of this industry,” said Roger Bates, chief financial officer for Tindell’s Building Materials. “Part of those changes involved looking at everything that we spend money on in an effort to make us more efficient internally as well as externally. In all that we do, we try to incorporate being good environmental stewards which meant part of our changes involved trying to go paperless wherever possible and not do duplicate work.  For example, we would get a vendor invoice and we might make a copy of it, process it through Accounts Payable and scan it and then fax it to somebody if there’s a question about it. So we were handling the same document multiple times and that led us to look at all of our processes and our equipment.”

 Every location had multiple copiers, printers, and fax machines, and as a fiscally responsible company, cost was of course a consideration when Tindell’s started looking at ways to improve office efficiency. The company was leaning toward the purchase of a competitive product instead of staying with its long-time dealer, Thermocopy, attracted by the fact that the brand they were looking at was so inexpensive. The Thermocopy team made a visit to the management at Tindell’s to discuss its own company commitment to environmental initiatives, including their Greenworks program, and the negative impact that going with a product that might be less expensive—but also a less environmentally friendly—would have on the business goals.

 While price was of course a consideration, Thermocopy was able to demonstrate how its proposed Ricoh solution was less costly over the contract term than the competitive solution. This included showing Tindell’s management the reduced landfill requirements of just replacing toner in the Ricoh equipment versus replacing almost 200  laser cartridges from the competitive equipment over the three-year contract. Additionally, Thermocopy used a predictive modeling formula that provided a detailed snapshot of future costs and predicted savings associated with each current and proposed device over the next 36 months. The model projected a 53 percent savings in power and CO2 emissions (over 5,000 lbs.) that the Ricoh equipment would deliver over the term of the lease. Tindell’s management was sold with these statistics. They also elected to list their business on GoGreenET.com, an organization founded by Thermocopy as a free, online resource created to educate and guide East Tennessee businesses towards becoming more environmentally responsible.

Solution

Thermocopy replaced the old equipment with the installation of Ricoh Aficio 161 multi-function printers in each location. The Ricoh Aficio MP 161 packs multi-functional productivity into a small footprint, saving both space and time. The MP 161 series combines four office devices so all printing, scanning, copying, and faxing can be done from the same source.

 “The multi-function printers that Thermocopy installed for us have been great for achieving our goal to eliminate as much paper as possible,” said Bates. “Instead of printing or copying documents multiple times, we now capture an electronic copy and process it all electronically with a more efficient work-flow. We have also looked at every process within the company: receiving, shipping, A/P, invoicing—and in each case we found ways to be more efficient and cut the waste out.”

Result

Tindell’s now has only one machine at each of its locations. Since the Ricoh 161 is an all-in-one solution it improves work-flow processes with just one plug, reducing paper flow and energy.

“Basically we’ve gone from three, four, five, six pieces of hardware at every location to one and the buy-in was good with our employees,” said Bates. “Change is never easy, but with the ease of use of this equipment and the training provided by Thermocopy, we really haven’t had any push-back at all.”

Tindell’s work to streamline every process is having success as well. Moving from getting a plethora of invoices every day in the mail and processing to a file folder in a row of file cabinets is a thing of the past.

“We’ve gone from manual files to getting electronic invoices, processing them electronically, never touching a piece of paper, and then using these machines to scan in the documents that you do get, and  file everything electronically. We’ve got dozens of file cabinets that are sitting in a warehouse that we don’t use. And I would say every process has been like that,” said Bates. “Another example is the cash registers at the retail locations. They handle cash and checks and credit cards and a lot of paper documents there. At the end of each day, they now take those documents and instead of putting them in an interoffice envelope that takes two to four days to arrive at our headquarters, they scan everything into a particular folder with these machines and our accountant is able to reconcile cash first thing the next morning. Documents are matched up with activity in the system. For a company our size, it’s a thing of beauty.”

From installing solar panels in its stores to being LEED and FSC certified to replacing old equipment and processes with more energy efficient solutions, Tindell’s Building Materials is living up to its commitment to be environmentally responsible and resource efficient. And while the market hasn’t fully demanded it yet, true to form, Tindell’s is already out in front of its competition.

“Thermocopy is the perfect partner for us because they foster the same culture we do when it comes to environmental initiatives and providing quality solutions for its customers. Even though green initiatives are not an expectation in our industry as of yet, we know that when it becomes more cost effective, it will become expected,” said Bates. “That will either be through legislation or simply costs coming down. I do believe all that we have done in this direction internally with the help of Thermocopy, and externally with our environmental focus, differentiates us as a company. So when the demand hits, which it will, we will be ready.”

Challenge

• Implement green practices throughout the company
• Improve efficiencies and reduce costs in document workflows

 

Solution

• Replace stand-alone copiers, printers and fax machines with space and time-saving Ricoh Aficio MFPs
• Revamp department workflows to replace paper workflows with the capture and filing of electronic images of documents

 

Result

• Lower long-term costs, energy consumption and reduce landfill requirements with energy-efficient MFPs that use toner versus less environmentally-friendly ink cartridges
• Reduction of physical file storage and paper use and improved efficiency in document workflows with streamlined electronic document processes