Brown goes Green

In an interesting announcement last week from HP (NYSE HPQ) and UPS (NYSE UPS), the companies are partnering around a "green" solution based on the sp400 all-in-one device, which graced this blog originally just over a year ago. (See "HP's 'Handheld sp400 All-in-One'".)

The combination "Green" / money savings breakthrough (funny how those seem to go together so often these days) comes in part from the ingenious and pragmatic step of simply printing label information directly on the shipping container (i.e. cardboard box), and forgoing the separate paper label. Other workflow efficiencies have been enabled too, but the "paperless label" idea is the point that I find brilliant in its simplicity. From the UPS Release:

By eliminating paper labels, it will save 1,338 tons of paper each year once the imprinter is fully deployed and millions of dollars in annual operating costs.

Jason Perlow over at the ZD Net Tech Broiler blog has a nice description of the solution. (See "UPS saves $30M and goes Green with new HP printing and scanning handheld".)