CUTTING PAPER - COUNTING - Inventorying your Paper Use

Inventorying your Paper Use

The figure below shows many of the copy paper flows through a typical office.

Each sheet passes through several important stages, and it can be measured at any step along the way. Try to measure all of them and see what you come up with. As you inventory paper, try to gather the following:

Number of units involved (reams of paper, number of printers, number of toner cartridges)
Weight/mass of the paper (pounds or tons)
Number of images made (and calculated duplexing rates)
Costs involved (dollars for purchasing, copying, or mailing)

With this type of information you can easily compare your organization to others such as in how many sheets of paper are used per employee per year or how much something costs in dollars/ton.

Be creative in your data sources. For example, several years ago, AT&T was trying to determine how much paper it buys. Company accounting systems couldn't easily provide the information, but they found that their paper suppliers could.

Look widely for data -- for example, your fax phone bills are most of the cost of using fax paper.

Remember that you are just trying to paint a general picture of your paper use, not count every last sheet. Use good estimates wherever you can; they often take much less time to assemble than precise figures, and you will generally get much more cooperation from those with the information if you ask easier questions.

Check your results for reasonableness. If your copiers use more paper than you buy, or your storage is 100 times your annual paper purchase, something is probably wrong. Check your figures against the ones offered here for a reality check. A few organizations are very different from the average, but if yours is, you ought to have a good explanation as to why.

Purchasing