Environmental sustainability and other social responsibility initiatives are a big deal as people become more aware and conscious of the impact that different organizations have on the world around us.
As public servants, procurement teams think about the best course for their community when it comes to sourcing goods and services. But it’s important to factor in not just smart spending, but how procurement aligns with community values—like lessening your organization’s negative impact on the environment.
But why exactly is environmental sustainability so important in the public sector? Here are a few key reasons:
- Building trust: By showing a commitment to environmental sustainability, agencies can build trust and credibility with their communities by dedicating efforts toward community values.
- Creating a positive impact: As society collectively becomes more aware of the massive impact we all have on environmental conditions, agencies have an opportunity to embrace new strategies that consider energy consumption.
- Improving employee satisfaction: Employees today are looking for more than just a paycheck—they want to work for an employer that shares their values and has a positive impact. Through environmental sustainability initiatives, agencies can improve employee satisfaction, engagement, and retention.
The Impact of Paperless Procurement
When public procurement teams bring their manual procurement processes online with purpose-built digital technologies, they gain efficiency, reduce risk, cut down on storage space requirements, unlock more valuable insights, and save a lot of paper.
Since implementing digital procurement and eliminating paper-based processes, Euna Procurement customers have reduced their impact on the environment, improving their organization’s sustainability—all while saving time and money, reducing risk, and driving more value.
With a paperless procurement process, our customers saved 238,390,911 sheets of paper.
For more context*, this amount of paper would cover a surface area of 3,342 acres, which equivalates to nearly 4x the size of Central Park. The amount of paper saved from this procurement transformation would come out to be 1,192 tons, the same as around 8 blue whales!
If these metrics weren’t already impactful, our software helped save 28,610 trees through digital procurement transformation—showing the positive environmental impact paperless procurement process can bring.
This has added resource savings, with 12,873 MWh of energy saved—enough to power a desktop computer for 85,811 years. 13 oz of water is used per page, so with the over 238M sheets of paper saved, we have helped save 23M gallons of water.
By using digital technologies for bid submission rather than paper submission, our customers have avoided over 795 tons of CO2 emissions from the delivery and transportation of bids alone.
The Next Step in Digital Procurement Software
The rise of cloud-based solutions offers a more sustainable approach to conducting procurement processes. Though a digital transformation sounds daunting, when done correctly, it offers a more flexible, integrated approach. Agencies have greater dataflow between departments and functions, more automation, fewer errors, and customizable workflows.
The best part—modern procurement platforms, like Euna Procurement, eliminate the need to implement an entire new system or revert to a web of workarounds when the needs and demands of the agency evolve. With improved productivity and efficiency, the agency’s procurement team can focus on high-value tasks and contribute more effectively toward achieving organizational goals, including sustainability and social responsibility initiatives.
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*This information was generated based off rough, generic calculations from the number of 8.5×11” pages our procurement software has saved versus how many pages would be used in a paper-based procurement process.