Greening the back office.

• Author: Costanzo, Chris

Howard Ruby, the chairman of Oak-wood Worldwide, a temporary housing provider, has turned a passion for polar bears and photography into a crusade to educate the world about global warming.

A photography trip to Northern Canada a few years ago opened Ruby's eyes to the troubles of polar bears--thinning in pounds and in numbers--as they struggled to find food while their glacial habitat melted away. The experience drove Ruby to get active on global warming, and he began to widely distribute his illustrative polar bear images, earning an award as "International Conservation Photographer of the Year" from the National Wildlife Federation.

Ruby carried his message to the company he founded, which manages nearly 23,000 residences for temporary use. Los Angeles-based Oakwood is now in the midst of a $2 million program to cut its production of greenhouse gases by 35 percent over 10 years by purchasing environmentally friendly products and conducting more recycling.

So, it was a bit incongruous that--until last year--Oakwood was taking in about 70,000 paper invoices every month, representing the utility, Internet, cable and phone bills of each of its rented units. Not only did it have to hire temporary workers to handle the influx, but for tax purposes, it also needed to store all that paper for seven years.

Oakwood knew it could run its billing operation more efficiently and environmentally friendly, while also better positioning itself for the future. "With our volume growth year over year, we knew we couldn't match our quality without automation," says Brad Niemiec, director of centralized accounts payable and receivable at Oakwood.

The firm then turned to a document-capture system that transforms all those bills into images as they enter the back office. Its scanning system analyzes the data on the bills, applies the proper coding, and uploads the bills to Oakwood's accounting system.

Automation has substantively changed how its billing department works. Rather than having 35 people manually enter data, it now employs 13 who open mail, scan the bills and review the resulting files. And in keeping with the firm's environmental ethos, it's now able to recycle all the bills that come in, since the electronic files eliminate the need to keep paper records.

Oakwood is one of a growing number of companies that are taking the environment into consideration as they make business decisions. While cost-cutting continues to be the main driver behind...