FaxAlon WHY FAXALON™?


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WHY FAXALON™?


Fax is an important and cost-effective means for business-to-business communications. Estimates show that more than 90% of U.S. businesses have fax machines and sales of fax machines maintain a steady growth rate. In 2002, more than 7.5 million fax machines were sold. Email volume that consumers received rose 60 percent from 2001 to 2002 (DoubleClick report), and Gartner expects that amount to triple by 2005. Due to spam, People are tuning out most e-mail. Sixty percent say they delete most e-mail without reading it. Also, ISPs are boosting efforts to block spam, making it tougher for messages from legitimate marketers to reach their audience. Furthermore, direct mail marketing is not a practical, time and cost-effective option either. Over 90% of faxed documents originate on a computer. It is therefore obvious that fax applications have become everyday requirements of business communications for all the company divisions, including purchasing, sales, customer service, human resources, marketing legal and accounting. To survive businesses and organizations must be able to both send and received faxes. This dependence on the fax has created a tremendous growth in the number of faxes that business entities are handling on a daily basis. Faxing in most cases is still very much an unmanaged resource that wastes both time and money and squanders resources. In most case, fax messaging generally consists of a configuration of hundreds of fax machines and thousands of workstations and laptops with fax modems. Below we present a case for properly and efficiently organizing the faxing functions and hopefully help decision makers make a proper judgment as to the fax solution they should use.

Fax versus Network Fax

Computer-Based Fax vs Network Based Fax Servers & Stand Alone Fax Servers
Computer-based faxes use PC’s to extend the functionality of fax machines. These generally use special fax applications and contain a fax modem that connects with the telephone network to provide the appropriate signals. These computer generated images have far better quality than an ordinary fax. Also these applications allow received faxes to be viewed by users on their desktop PC’s, as can be printed. In contrast to the above there are the network fax servers, which are made up of applications installed on a server. These connect to the organization’s local area network (LAN). They contain fax modems or intelligent fax cards that connect them with the telephone network to manage the volumes of inbound and outbound fax calls. The Stand Alone FaxAlon™ takes this to the next level and provides a separate server which resides as an independent device on the network and therefore does NOT impinge on the existing network servers or their functionality.

But Isn't Fax Use Diminishing?
In 2002, there were more than 500 billion fax pages shooting around the globe. According to many industry experts, the emerging technologies are actually going to transactions that can't be processed by electronic transmissions of coded data, the business of e-business, enterprise resource planning systems, web sites, and even mobile data systems use fax as a complementary transmission method. For the first time in the United States and Canada, e-mail emerged as the most used tool in the communications tool kit, with 97 percent of North American workers reporting that they use e-mail every day or several times a week. Fax communications tools like fax machines and fax servers also emerged as a frequently used tool, with 70% of workers faxing daily. According to a 2002 Pitney Bowes study, U.S. workers rely on more communications tools to organize their work, using an average of seven communications tools like email and fax applications on a daily basis, compared to six for Canadian and United Kingdom workers, and five for German and French workers. "Messaging for Innovation: Building the Innovation Infrastructure Through Messaging Practices" builds on four years of trend data compiled and examined by Pitney Bowes. It is the first and only study of its kind to examine the complete desktop messaging environment of knowledge workers - how they use messaging tools to impact their productivity and organizational value.

Can a Fax Server replace a Fax Machine? Yes and no!
The main reason many businesses implement fax servers is to save time by sending from one's desktop PC rather than walking to the fax machine. Manual faxing requires printing a document from the PC, walking to the fax machine, filling out a cover sheet, dialing, sending and waiting to make sure your transmission was successful. Recent research shows that sending one fax manually takes an average of 10 minutes. With a fax server, faxes are sent at network-based speed, from the convenience of your desk, reducing labor costs associated with faxing by 90%. That is why fax servers can pay for themselves fairly quickly. Most organizations keep their fax machines even after they install fax servers and they find that their daily dependence on fax machines declines substantially and is only used for those documents which they only have in paper format. When compared to single-user fax/data modems, network fax servers offer: Cost-justification for use of intelligent fax boards, which send faxes more quickly due to use of MR and MMR fax compression along with faster handshaking, which means reduced phone charges The offloading of file-conversion processing to the server so it doesn't take time at the end user PC The ability to keep fax servers on 24-hours-a-day, which means its ability to receive faxes is constant (as opposed to what happens when an individual user turns off [or undocks] their PC with a fax modem in it). In corporate environments, fax servers eliminate the need to run analog line or put in analog adapters so that PC fax modems can connect to phone lines.

Using Fax Servers to Streamline Business Operations
The majority of industry experts would agree that implementing fax servers for electronic delivery has the following benefits amongst others: Reduce Fax Phone Bill Costs: Using a fax server or several of them reduces the number of phone lines in an organization, thereby lowering phone bills. They also provide substantial savings in reducing labor costs, printing, postage, equipment and supply costs which come with manual faxing or mailing documents. Boost Desktop User Productivity: Employees do not waste time at the fax machine waiting to send or receive documents. They fax them right from their desktop or automatically from business applications. Achieve Better Response Times: Communicate quicker and more efficiently with customers, partners, prospects and suppliers by providing information they need, when they need it. Provides Security, Confidentiality, Accountability and Reliability: Email is very prone to computer viruses, which might be transmitted through attachments, such as MS Word files. Faxes, on the other hand, cannot contain or propagate computer viruses because a fax is really just a telephone call. Furthermore, faxes which are confidential in their nature, can be received directly to a particular person and sent directly without intermediate unwanted casual viewing. Also, a Fax Server reports that either the message was delivered successfully or the transmitting server reports an error to the sender, so that desktop users know for certain if fax documents were delivered successfully or not. Reduces Administration and Maintenance: Consolidate faxing services on the network so that administrators do not waste time dealing with a myriad of fax modems, telephone lines and different fax machines. Centralized, easy-to-use administration and reporting tools ensure hassle-free administration. Automating Core Business Processes: Fax Servers can be harnessed to automate core business application integration. For example, medical labs can automatically fax test results, insurance agents can automatically file image documents with the home office, and real-estate agencies can provide remote searching of residential listings for relocating executives. Companies can fax newsletters to save all the hassle of printing them, stuffing them in envelopes, adding postage, etc. It can also be used in a fax-on-demand environment.

So what about the ROI - Return On Investment?
Based on U.S. Census Bureau data, an average white-collar wage for a male employee in the United States is $22.20 per hour. At the average of 10 minutes each for manual faxing, that comes to $3.70 per fax. Sending 10 faxes a day (conservatively speaking), comes to about $12,025 a year in labor alone to use a fax machine. Depending on the size of your company, your entire organization probably sends dozens, hundreds or even thousands of faxes every day. It’s easy to calculate just how much manual faxing costs to your organization. After also adding the hard costs of paper, supplies, fax machines and equipment maintenance, the ROI on automated faxing increases dramatically. Add to this also the costs associated with even one important fax that is lost or misplaced. According to industry experts Maury Kauffman and Peter Davidson, members of consulting firms unified messaging technology, most companies with 10 employees or more that are sending faxes probably need a fax server; those with 25+ definitely do.

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