The Three Rs...

When I first started school, all that mattered were the three Rs (arrrrs), Reading, wRiting, and aRithmetic; they were the staples of "learning." Today it seems that a new three Rs are on everyone's lips. Reduce, Reuse, Recycle; they are the staples for "living."

We were motivated to "learn" effectively by the promise of future opportunity. But what motivates us to "live" efficiently? Reduced costs? Improved Services? Save time? Improve our children's future? Clearly there needs to be a motivation to change.

To reduce auto-emissions "car-pooling" has long since been the mechanism for getting from A-B efficiently. Indeed, some countries with areas of high traffic congestion have introduced car-pooling lanes, and made them available only to cars carrying more than one person. So rather deservingly the energy-conscious driver who is motivated to "collaborate" with other travelers, gets from A-B faster while reducing fuel consumption. The motivation here is time and money.

Reducing the number of trips you make in your car to the supermarket will also have a substantial impact. According to a UK-based Web site called "Carbon Calculator" if you have your groceries delivered, your average family of 4 may reduce your carbon emissions by up to 3 metric tons of CO2 per year. Better still you immediately have more time to dedicate to other activities.

On the same "supermarket" theme you may also choose now to reduce your shopping bag consumption. Marks & Spencer - a UK retail institution - started to charge shoppers for plastic bags and immediately reduced "bag consumption" by 70% in trial stores. People voted quickly with their wallets.

"This move lies at the heart of our 100-point eco plan, Plan A. http://plana.marksandspencer.com/ We want to make it easy for our customers to do their bit to help the environment and our trials have shown us that they want to take action," says CEO Sir Stuart Rose. "Just imagine if M&S customers right across the U.K. cut the number of food bags they use by 70% - that's over 280 million bags they'd be saving every year."

In place of the disposable plastic bags M&S is selling a reusable "bag for life" at just 10p each, and promises to replace worn-out bags for free so that they may be recycled. All great ways to reduce, reuse, and recycle. But how does any of this map to our world of sustaining infrastructure?

Well one way to reduce energy consumption is to consolidate and centralize the IT/IS services you stand up and consume. A point made well in a Blog from an old business acquaintance of mine in the UK - Paul Wilkinson.

Titled "SaaS-tainability" Paul wrote: "Externally-hosted, web-based solutions mean no (or low) in-house IT hosting, support and storage requirements - widespread use of SaaS applications could dramatically reduce the scale of in-house ICT resources, with a corresponding reduction in hardware, personnel, energy use and other overheads."

Sounds just like our "ProjectWise OnLine" Managed Solution to me. Especially as greater reuse of information and better collaboration will enable users to further reduce rework and reduce the energy consumed by work processes.

ProjectWise OnLine is for organizations that want an engineering project team collaboration system, but don't want to deploy the necessary skills and resources in-house. Hosted by Bentley, and enabled as a combination of software plus professional services, ProjectWise OnLine provides collaborating teams with all the benefits of an integrated ProjectWise system as a fully managed solution.

ProjectWise OnLine is unlike other hosted solutions as it is the only one to deliver integrated and optimized solutions for content management, content publishing, and design review across distributed teams.

The bottom line: every incremental improvement in how we live counts. And collaboration on many levels leads to many improvements.

Cheers

JC

<< Previous Blog Entry       |      Next Blog Entry >>

  • Joe,

    You are getting so old (really I am just so young) because you have left out the newest and hip-est 'R' of all.  Before you Reduce, Reuse, or Recycle... you might be better of just Refusing.  To Refuse isn't always possible, but let's be serious, we tend to over consume and over produce in our society.  Maybe this is why it would take roughly 7 planets to provide the necessary resources if everyone consumed like the average American.  Good thing you are from the UK!

    Moral of the story... Refuse, if you can't, Reduce, when you reduce, reuse, when you can't reuse any longer, recycle...

    -Jason

  • Hi Stuart,

    Thanks for your comment - and for joining our communites!

    We now have a number of ProjectWise offerings for companies of all shapes and sizes and all are proven to return many multiples of their investment in increased productivity and reduced operational costs.

    Please check out our case study page at www.bentley.com/ProjectWiseSuccess for more details.

    As for ProjectWise OnLine - that's a very new offering for us, our CEO Greg spoke about it at our BE Conference last week, but you can expect to hear very much more about ProjectWise Online in the coming months. If you don't then please poke me - i am the marketing guy for ProjectWise.

    If you simply can't wait please call your account manager who will be happy to tell you more.

    Cheers

    JC

  • This is all very well but how much does ProjectWise cost? Last time I looked it was way too expensive for a relative small organisation like ours. I have to say that I have not heard of ProjectWise Online, which is a failing by Bentley marketing in my view. What is involved and how much does it cost? In a lot of respects cost is the bottom line.

    Stuart

  • Joe,

    Where I went to school  it was the three ahhhhhhhs :-) but the same content.  

    Since you use the supermarket example, I wanted to share a personal anecdote with you.  

    My daughter has been bugging me for months  to use reusable shopping  bags rather than accepting plastic from the grocery store.   So yesterday I took all the discarded but still usable cotton tote bags and school book bags from the hall closet and trotted off ( ok I drove but with out air conditioning) to the grocery store.  While there I purchased two insulated/reusable carry sacks for the frozen goods that always seem to defrost a bit on the way home. Long story short, I did shopping for 4 days with NO additional plastic bags coming home.

    And ......the store deducted 3 cents off my bill for each of the bags I used! They did have a sign posted to this effect, but I never saw it before always keeping eyes averted that the items rang up correctly on the register!

    An additional benefit was that upon my return home , I got huge kudos  from my daughter for my bold act -  thus becoming a little less  "out of it" in her eyes - you will understand this better in about 16 years time.  I also had no plastic bags to remember to carry back to the store for recycling!

    Secondly, on a more serious note,  I enjoyed reading Paul Wilkinson's article on "SaaS-tainability". I always understood that ProjectWise and its cousin ProjectWise Online were  awesome collaboration tools - both bringing synergies allowing for  savings in time, personnel and overhead - but I never thought about the energy saving angle!   I will have to figure a way to build that aspect into the pitch for my Task Innovation team.

    Thanks for sharing.

    Cathy