Corporate “swap meets”

By Kim Allen, PhD, TFI Environment Consultant

At home, you likely have already experienced the benefits and fun of locating used items through online forums, rather than spending time and (too much) money shopping for them new. Freecycle, Zwaggle, and of course Craig’s List have saved people millions of dollars while simultaneously benefiting the environment through avoided production, shipping emissions, and landfill burden.

Smart companies are starting to realize that they can profit from the same concept within their four walls.

Why purchase a new stapler when an employee upstairs has ended up with three in his desk drawer? Why order new equipment for the test lab when the research lab has a spare one used last year that is no longer needed? A glance at the monthly spend of a typical company for office supplies, equipment, and research materials will convince any manager that this type of sharing and swapping is tremendously beneficial to the bottom line, not to mention conserving the Earth’s resources. The question is, how to set it up practically?

Luckily, most companies already have all the tools they need to create their own “swap meet.” The corporate intranet is a natural place to set up a forum for posting “offers” and “needs.” It can be done through most types of collaboration platforms, discussion boards, or common drive spaces that all employees can access and search.

One example is the Cisco® Resource Exchange and Disposal Online (CREDO) program. Program manager Gideon Schroeder explains that CREDO is “an in-house virtual equipment exchange” that also helps Cisco handle its scrap. “The ultimate goal is to prevent any Cisco equipment or parts from ending up in landfills.” The system – which is ISO 14001 certified – is saving company money and employees’ time, and diverting electronic waste from landfills.

CREDO is for equipment. Another tech company, a TFI client in the electronic hardware business, is setting up an online swap site that will include standard office supplies, monitors, printers, chairs, and other items that tend to accumulate in people’s cubes. It is one antidote to purchasing departments’ practice of blithely buying a fresh set for every new hire.

But how do you actually get employees to use the “swap meet” when they are accustomed to ordering something new, and how do you quantify the monetary and carbon-emission savings from the program? We recommend the following four steps (which we customize for each client according to their company culture and accounting systems):

(1) Generate interest and educate employees on how to use the system, emphasizing the time-saving benefit.
(2) Give employees incentives to track their swaps. To measure the monetary and environment-footprint savings, it is critical to know what swaps have been completed. If employees swap items by walking down the hall, they need a reason to record the transaction online. One way is to reward both the giver and the receiver with “points,” redeemable for rewards or recognition.
(3) Track transactions using categories that match purchasing or accounting conventions. In particular, it is critical to know when an asset item (as opposed to an expense) has been transferred between departments.
(4) Show progress: Create a graphic for the intranet and company newsletter that shows how much money or waste has been saved to date. Also, make it easy also for employees to suggest how to maximize the program’s utility.

Has your company benefited from an internal swapping system? Let’s make this an “information swap” — please send us your comments!

Posted by Pamela J. Gordon, July 10th, 2009