How the National Eyecare Group reduced paper consumption

What made you start the journey to greater sustainability?

Our initial aim was to reduce our paper consumption. With over 1000 members across the UK each receiving a monthly statement with copies of every invoice, we were using over half million pieces of paper per year, each of which was printed on which lead to a massive use of resources.

What were your first steps?

Our first step was to create our own electronic invoicing system, that allowed us to to send all the information that we sent members monthly in an electronic format. There wasn’t an off the shelf option, so our development team at Optinet set to work and have developed a fully paperless system, that now means members receive an email each month with their statement and access to an online portal where they can view all their invoices and see what they are spending.

A big advantage of this means that members have 24/7 access to the information and can review previous months statements and invoices.

This now means that producing our monthly statement for members uses no paper or ink!

What challenges have you faced?

Creating the software proved to take a lot longer than we anticipated. The real issues came around reading paper invoices from suppliers into the system, as all the suppliers invoices where different and many were hard to scan or read. But we have worked with suppliers to a point now, that apart from a couple of suppliers, we receive all the information electronically, making it easier for our staff to process and again reducing the use of paper.

What has worked really well?

Our members have been delighted with the introduction of this system, some were concerned at first and asked for the paper version to continue, but as soon as they saw the on line portal and the information that it contains they were happy to drop the paper completely. It has also meant that we have been able to get the statements to members quicker, often getting to members 5 days sooner than before as we process everything much quicker and we no longer have to reply on the postal service.

What do you plan to do next to become even more sustainable?

We continue to look at how we can reduce the paper we use internally and how much we have stored from previous years, our aim is to be paperless in the next couple of years. We are not only aiming for this for our selves, but via our IT division Optinet, we are working towards helping practices to be paperless.