I recently started a job at a mid sized new car deal­er­ship, and as with most deal­er­ships its size reduc­ing its car­bon foot­print was some­where near the bot­tom of its “to do list”.

I’ve worked in this busi­ness before, and at my other deal­er­ship we used to joke about the mas­sive amount of wasted paper, but here there was on lone voice of rea­son that heard my cries for a more “green” ini­tia­tive, and together Cather­ine and I are slowly bring­ing our deal­er­ship into the 21st cen­tury and leav­ing paper behind!

The Goal:

The goal is sim­ple; reduce the amount of paper we waste while increas­ing pro­duc­tiv­ity and max­i­miz­ing the tools and util­i­ties at our disposal.

The Tools:

The tools we have are basic, run of the mill com­put­ers loaded with Win­dows and not enough RAM!  90% of us have smart­phones, and 100% of us have access to the inter­net in one form or another.  I myself have an iPad and an iPhone as well as a desk­top com­puter all which will play a part in my challenge.

Hard­ware:

• iPhone 4
• iPad 3
• Mac­Book Pro
• Win­dows Machine

Soft­ware (Apps)

• Penul­ti­mate
• Drop­box
• Ever­note
• Drop it!
• Doc­u­ments Pro

The Plan:

The plan is for me to slowly inte­grate sev­eral online tools such as Drop­box and Ever­note into my daily sales and fol­low up rou­tine.  At the same time I will help edu­cate my co-workers to uti­lize the power and con­ve­nience of PDF’s and other forms of editable forms until the need for paper is all but eliminated.

I feel that there will be a num­ber of chal­lenges await­ing me, mostly from the staff here sim­ply due to the fact that they’re com­fort­able in their way of doing things.Training and equipt­ment will put restric­tions on the progress, as to go com­pletely paper­less will require upgraded tech­nol­ogy and soft­ware, which all comes at a cost to the deal­er­ship.  A cost analy­sis will have to be done to deter­mine the finan­cial ben­e­fit of the elim­i­na­tion of paper.

Until then, I’ll be doc­u­ment­ing my progress one screen at a time!