WellPoint, one of the nation’s largest health benefits companies, has partnered with Xerox to adopt greener business practices and save more than $3 million annually using managed print services (MPS) to better manage the way documents are printed, shared and updated across WellPoint’s 90 office locations.

Xerox and WellPoint designed the Green Office Initiative, a sustainable document strategy that helps WellPoint better monitor how much printing is being done, and provide employees with more environmentally sensitive ways to work with documents.  By deploying MPS, WellPoint eliminated 9,000 devices – printers, copiers and fax machines – in favor of more efficient multifunction devices.  As a result, paper expenses are down more than $280,000 from last year and WellPoint estimates a 60 percent reduction in print-related energy use and total greenhouse gases. 

“WellPoint’s Green Office Initiative has four over-arching goals: reduce waste, enhance recycling efforts, minimize creation of greenhouse gases and create an energy-efficient work environment,” said Andrew J. Lang, CIO and senior vice president, WellPoint. “Thanks to our partnership with Xerox, we are making significant strides toward reaching these goals.”

To successfully reach sustainability and savings goals, Xerox and WellPoint implemented an education campaign to help employees understand the new print and document features – and the importance of using them. WellPoint gathers feedback from employees and conducts customer surveys to continuously improve the program. 

The Green Office Initiative builds on Xerox’s existing relationship with WellPoint for healthcare communication services, which helps simplify and personalize communications with the approximately 34 million members of WellPoint’s affiliated health plans. In addition to managing printing, mailroom, member fulfillment services and outbound member and provider communications, Xerox plans to add e-delivery services to help WellPoint shift to a platform that replaces paper with secure e-documents. To generate communications that members are more likely to respond to, associates can use the new platform to add personal, relevant data about members’ life stages, needs and preferences.

As the worldwide market leader in MPS, Xerox is working with businesses of all sizes to simplify the way work gets done – so employees spend less time managing documents, and more time focused on their core business. Xerox integrates MPS into the IT infrastructure to help intelligently organize information from both paper and electronic sources. The company was named the worldwide market share leader and positioned by Gartner, Inc., in the Leaders Quadrant in the 2011 Magic Quadrant for Managed Print Services Worldwide and recognized as a leader in IDC’s Managed Print Services and Basic Print Services 2012-2015 Forecast and Analysis report and 2011 MPS MarketScape report. Additionally, Xerox earned the top position in Quocirca’s 2012 MPS report.