I helped reducing our PMO´s monthly paper spending by 95%

🎯Goal: reduce the spending on paper in a project manager office (PMO)

✅Plan: track paper consumption & digitalize processes.

🗺️Context: 

In an effort to contribute to get the ISO 14001 certificacion for the Ucab Guayana and to reduce the department expenses, our PMO executed an improvement project named "PMO saving paper".

NOTES:

1. Some images have been censored for confidentiality purposes.
2. Images are in Spanish because this university is located in Venezuela.

I led this improvement project after the last project manager left. Here are the steps we followed:

1) Track consumption

After each printing, every PMO member had to fill out the form hanged in a board next to the printer with:

1. Their name.
2. The number of sheets used.
3. The type of sheet: new or used (with one side printed).
4. The category (what is the printing for): a specific-project, office, personal, among others.

2) Entry consumption data in Excel

Every month, the PMO assistant entried the data from the tracking form in Excel:

3) Build consumption report

I built a monthly report that showed the paper consumption:

1. By PMO member, by category, by month.
2. In terms of number of sheets & cost of sheets.

4) Analyze report & improve

In each month´s first weekly meeting, I presented the report and we all agreed on improvement actions. The primary actions we had to slowly implement were:

1. Extensively use used-papers for printing.
2. Digitalize our processes. This included removing the need of printing reports from the procedures of the processes that were part of the ISO 9001 certification.

🎯Thanks to these actions, we managed to reduce the PMO spending in paper by 95%.