Monarch Makes Earth Day a Million Dollar Idea

Earth Day is on April 22nd this year, and today we’ll examine how Monarch can be a terrific tool for environmentally conscious organizations.

Every week I use Monarch to consolidate information from over 100 report runs from an ERP system, and create custom Excel reports with that data which are published for many users. This means that each user is not required to print the system reports that they would normally need to manage their responsibilities.

This typically results in a total of about a half a gigabyte worth of ASCII text files, and about 136,000 pages being included in the reports. This week Monarch counted 136,844 total pages for all of the reports needed.

Using some figures from Conservatree, if every page were printed that would require 136,884 pages/8,333 trees (8,333 pages per tree), or about 16.4 trees every week. Given that usefully cutting down 0.4 trees is a bit tough, let’s call it 17 trees – that’s 884 trees a year!

Save Your Money

Let’s calculate the retail cost of all of that paper. By not printing the reports, there’s a savings of $7.60 per 500 sheet ream of laser printer paper (according to the prices quoted today by a major online office supply retailer), or $2,080 a week ($108,193 a year).

Or course in order to print we’ll need toner for the printer. A typical cartridge might print 20,000 pages, and costs about $270 retail (again, using the same online retailer). We’ll need 6.8 cartridges a week, so that’ll be $95,472 a year. Plus there are the additional costs of electricity and the staff time of printing and handling all that paper, but we’ll ignore that.

So what do we have in costs, approximately? Over $200,000 annually. Plus applicable sales taxes, naturally.

I’ve been distributing information in this manner for about five years, so I’d say that I’m up about $1,000,000. And 4,420 trees too. At a 12 foot by 12 foot spacing, that’s about 14.5 acres, and would be a nice little portion of hometown Vancouver’s beautiful Queen Elizabeth Park!

Add to that the costs and fuels required to actually convert 4,420 trees into paper and then package and transport it for consumption. Considering its efficiency, Datawatch should consider having Monarch carry the “Energy Star” seal.

Do we still print reports? Of course, but our consumption is nowhere near what it would be without our Monarch based solution.

You can get anything you want, using Monarch software

It’s good that I’ve been able to cut costs, save trees and be simultaneously productive and efficient.

But, to paraphrase Arlo Guthrie’s classic “Alice’s Restaurant” somewhat, can you imagine if three people used Monarch to do the same? They may think it’s an organization. And can you imagine fifty people a day, I said fifty people a day installing Monarch and cutting costs and not trees? Friends, they may think it’s a movement.

Free with every environmental solution: great BI tools!

If you thought that your organization couldn’t afford to implement a great report management solution like Monarch|RMS, take a moment to reconsider today.

Given all that you’ll read, hear, and see this upcoming Earth Week, you may well find that you can simultaneously be environmentally responsible and save an awful lot of money too. All that you need to do is choose to excel with Monarch.