My Go Green Project
2:48 PM
Today,
I presented my project proposal in the class. We are required to come out with
our CSR project for our company. I work
in ING bank under Financial Markets Operations, and of the things I noted was
that we are printing a lot of papers for our end of day. So my project proposal is to go paperless.
To briefly explain my project, here's the quick background about it. My project plans to automate and make
the manual end of day checking procedure of my team paperless. At our present
process, we are manually printing our end of day (EOD) reports, which contains
all the transactions processed for the day, and will verify if payments for the
trades settling for the day have been sent already or not.
These EOD checks
will ensure that all the trades have been executed correctly, and that there
are no pending or delayed payments to our clients. The risk of pre-settlement
and settlement failure is minimized through this check.
However, since FM Asia
Onshore provides service to different Asian branches, we have to print end of
day reports for all of these branches which include Singapore, Hong Kong,
Shanghai, Taipei, Beijing, Seoul, Manila, and Tokyo. With this current
procedure, hundreds of pages are printed every day, making heavy usage of paper
supplies and high printing costs for energy and ink usage. It is also time
consuming to print and go to the printer and wait for pages to be completely
printed. Manual checking is also prone to human errors and time consuming as
well. There is also a problem in terms of space where these print outs will be
stored for record keeping.
What are the benefits of this project?
1. Minimizes the Paper Consumption
ING
believes that managing environmental impact is a key to achieving the goal of
being truly sustainable. As part of ING, our team should also participate in
minimizing our environmental damages to the society. Given that we are heavily
uses paper on our daily operation, we should try to minimize it as possible and
as soon as we can. Statistically, a rough average of 24 trees is needed to
produce a ton of non-recycled printing papers (Conservatree Org, 2006) . 1 ton of paper is
equivalent to 400 reams or 200,000 sheets of paper. If we are to compute, for
our team’s EOD check, every year we are using around 30,000 ( = 300 days x 100
paper) pages of paper which implies that 3 to 4 trees each year has been downed
for this process alone.
By
making the process paperless, we are contributing to sustainability as we are
minimizing our global environmental footprint. At the same time, we are also
decreasing the cost of using paper.
Therefore, with this initiative we are not just benefitting the society,
but also benefitting ourselves in terms of minimized cost.
2. Decreases Energy Consumption and Printing Costs
As
mentioned in the corporate website of ING, we are aware that “the modern world
depends on energy for everyday needs ranging from food production to the
transport of goods and people, to heating and lighting. Not wasting it is as
important as how it’s generated.” (ING, 2015)
By implementing this initiative, we minimize our energy consumption, which
therefore adheres to our stand in the notion of energy. We are going to save
energy from not printing, and at the same time our printing costs will be
minimized. Lesser ink and lesser electricity costs will be met.
3. Saves Storage Spaces and Easier Record Keeping
One
problem with too much print outs is that we ran out of spaces to store these
files. Several storages will be filled out with these papers, and if we are to
continue with this process for more years, we would need to rent a warehouse to
store these, which entails higher costs for the storage, and it will be hard
for us to look for the previous report files we had. Operating in the field of
financial services, we are internally and externally audited from time to time,
which means that we really need to keep our previous files for references. By
implementing this initiative, it will be easier for us to look for the previous
reports we had, since it will just be done through a mouse click on a
designated computer document folder. Plus, there is nothing to worry about
physical storage spaces.
4. Saves Time and Minimizes Employee Effort
It
is sometimes exhausting for employees to go back and fort to the printer. It
takes time to go to the printer and wait for the reports to be printed. Aside
from that, manual checking by the naked eyes of employees is being done. As we
all know, humans are prone to errors and might missed to check some of the
trades especially that we are operating globally and there are thousands of
trades executed among different types of products.
As part of ING, I believe that our team should participate in
minimizing our environmental damages to the society. Given that we heavily uses
paper on our daily operation, we should try to minimize it as possible and as
soon as we can. Our small effort will contribute to our global stand in the
society, and will be a big help to sustain the environment. As of now, my project is still ongoing and I'm hoping that it will be fully implemented soon, so that we can minimize our carbon footprint and make our process more environmental friendly.
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Works Cited:
Conservatree
Org. (2006, September 17). Trees Into Paper. Retrieved March 2017, 2017,
from Conservatree.Org:
http://conservatree.org/learn/EnviroIssues/TreeStats.shtml
ING. (2015,
November 15). ING in Society. Retrieved March 25, 2017, from ING:
https://www.ing.com/ING-in-Society/Sustainability/Our-Stance/Energy.htm
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