Xerox Provides New Tools to Reduce Printing Impact

Given the widespread popularity of digital communications, you might imagine that the use of paper should just about be dead by now.

Here’s a reality check: Although paper consumption is declining in North America, it is still on the rise worldwide. And before we get too carried away patting ourselves on the back, it’s worth noting that Americans still use far more paper per capita than any other people in the world, upwards of 500 pounds per year each. A full 40 percent of all industrial logging goes into paper production, and that number is expected to increase.

Xerox just announced a couple of new services that can help reduce paper consumption. That might be a little surprising for a company that, not long ago, made most of its revenue based on the number of pages customers printed. Now, in additional to copiers, the company also provides services like document management, which has reoriented Xerox towards helping its customers become more productive.

The Xerox Print Awareness Tool is a software application, developed at Xerox’ European Research Center, that can give you another reality check. It asks how many copies you think you print each month, and then gives you the actual numbers. This is done not to harass you, but to befriend you and win your trust -- with the promise that it will help you become more productive and less wasteful. At that point, it becomes a kind of game. Users are given a monthly allocation of points based on their nominal printing requirements. Feedback is provided to compare users to their peers, and suggestions are made with ways to improve productivity.

This might seem odd, but it is, in fact, part of a growing trend of workplace gamification, which has been touted as an effective way to increase employee engagement.

The other tool launched by the company is called Xerox Digital Alternatives. This is a pretty nifty set of tools that allow workers to move smoothly and easily between the paper and the digital world. Say you have a form you need to fill out and sign, and you only have it available in hard copy. After scanning the page and bringing it up on screen, you can fill it in using an annotate function, which is a kind of floating text box that automatically aligns itself to lines on the form. The application remembers where the text has been placed for printing or future edits. The sign feature works in a similar manner, though it inserts a color digital image of your signature. The read function brings e-reader capabilities to scanned or digital documents and encourages users to read the information onscreen, rather than printing it out (and thus winning the user points on the Print Awareness Tool). The application, which also contains share and save functions that are self-explanatory, will run on Windows platforms or iPads.

Xerox also announced partnerships with Hyland, makers of OnBase enterprise content management and workflow software, and Datawatch, data visualization software, to accelerate the migration from paper to digital.

Both of these tools can help to reduce paper consumption, which is a win for both the users and the planet.

Image courtesy of Xerox

RP Siegel, PE, is an author, inventor and consultant. He has written for numerous publications ranging from Huffington Post to Mechanical Engineering. He and Roger Saillant co-wrote the successful eco-thriller Vapor Trails. RP, who is a regular contributor to Triple Pundit and Justmeans, sees it as his mission to help articulate and clarify the problems and challenges confronting our planet at this time, as well as the steadily emerging list of proposed solutions.  A former award-winning inventor at Xerox, Siegel's uniquely combined engineering and humanities background help to bring both global perspective and analytical detail to bear on the questions at hand.

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