What Color is Electronic Signature and Electronic Contract Execution?

State of Green Business Report

In February, Joel Makower released the second annual State of Green Business report, State of Green Business 2009, which assesses how and how well companies are doing from an environmental perspective. From reporting on the 10 trends of the past year as well as providing insight via 20 indicators that, in aggregate, provide a picture of U.S. companies’ environmental achievements.

Some of the news was encouraging and some was discouraging: Absolute greenhouse gas emissions grew 1.4 percent in 2007 over 2006, but shrank 0.6 percent per unit of GDP, the smallest annual decrease since 2002. Regarding electronic waste (“e-waste”), we recycled only a tiny fraction more e-waste in 2007 than the year before, even though the amount of e-waste entering the waste stream increased.

The encouraging side of things includes Makower’s findings that green building is on the rise – new technologies that save energy and money while creating more healthful workplaces. The automobile industry’s major players plan to introduce electric vehicles and the leading consumer packaged goods manufacturers and retailers are starting to rigorously assess their products’ environmental impacts, which has implications to the supply chain that tomorrow’s products will be held to higher levels of environmental responsibility.

I also found some interesting green statistics:

• The amount of wood and paper we throw away each year is enough to heat 50 million homes for 20 years.
• Using recycled paper for one print run of the Sunday edition of the New York Times would save 75,000 trees.
• If every American recycled just one-tenth of their newspapers, we would save about 25 million trees a year.

According to Xerox research:

• 15.2 trillion pages were printed in 2006
• 10 trillion pages were printed in 2007 – 2010 in the US alone
• 53 trillion pages will be printed worldwide by 2010
  

To say we use a lot of paper is an understatement. In business, contracts, paperwork and other documents mean constant paper usage and document creation.

Unless…

There’s a better way. There’s a greener way. DocuSign’s electronic contract execution (ECE) process integrates with your workflow so that all of the physical (paper) documents you used to send can now be sent electronically, minimizing your physical document creation. As a matter of fact, if you dig around your business you will find that you spend a HUGE amount to manage the movement of paper.. It is not just lower postage and the cost of paper. It is also people – people who have to re-key data, scanners, printers, toner, physical storage space – it all adds up.

Say you hire someone – he or she has to sign a two page offer letter, a four page non-compete & non-disclosure agreement, a three page declaration of intellectual property, and a one page statement of company policy. That’s 10 pages for an employee, when he or she first walks in the door. Times two because you probably made a copy. Now, multiply that by the number of employees you hire a year. For a 50 person company, that’s 500 pages – with copies, that’s 1,000 pages – that now need storage.

That’s just for hiring – what about the other associated paperwork? What about contracts with your vendors and suppliers? What about contracts with your customers?

By providing secure storage of digital documents, DocuSign also addresses your storage needs. In addition to realizing operational savings from sending documents electronically instead of via overnight shipping and accelerating your business by allowing you to close more deals more quickly, DocuSign also allows you to go green. Our electronic signature and online contract execution services can greatly reduce the paper your business creates. Operational savings and increased business capacity while creating an environmentally friendly business impact can help your business succeed in this economic climate.

In fact, our system is now processing over 1.5 million electronic signature events per month. We’ve processed about 23 million to date. This means our customers collectively are saving the following:

• Estimating a savings of 5 days per contract, or in the aggregate about 315,000 years of waiting has been avoided
• At an average of 10 pages per envelope and 1.7 signers, this is 391M pages of paper that did not have to be used or moved saving 5,000 trees.
• If these pages had been printed, it would take roughly 78,000 toner cartridges (5,000 page duty cycle). That is a line of toner cartridges over 22 miles long!

So here’s to a happy St. Patrick’s day! Go Green!

Image courtesy of flickr user pburghsteverunder creative commons.