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Standardizing Fax for Your B2B Relationships

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Standardizing Fax for YourB2B Relationships

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Standardizing Fax for Your B2B Relationships

What do you do when your organization has stopped using fax — but some of your vendors and customers still require it?

Although fax is a technology in decline, millions of businesses around the world still rely on it every day to transmit at least some of their important documents — contracts, purchase orders, invoices, etc. This means some of your partners and customers will likely continue using fax to do business — and require you to do so as well. New investment in fax hardware is not a cost-effective solution. Neither is creating an ad hoc “process” where your employees stand in line at an office fax machine waiting to send a vendor invoice or receive a customer order by fax. So what do you do when your company no longer maintains a standardized fax solution but your employees still need to fax — whether occasionally or regularly — to conduct your business? The answer can be found in cloud-based, pay-as-you-go hosted fax services.

“Our business doesn’t use fax anymore.” This is a common position for businesses today, and a logical one. A contracting world economy has for years placed pressure on businesses to trim costs. With more cost-effective communication technologies now available, many businesses have been phasing out costly fax infrastructure — fax servers, fax machines, fax phone lines, and other components of legacy fax solutions.

According to the 2012 report “The New Fax,” by analyst firm Davidson Consulting, paper-based faxing can cost an organization $25,000 per fax machine per year, when factoring in all related costs (including phone lines, transmission costs, employee labor and time spent at the fax, IT trouble-shooting, maintenance contracts, power consumption, paper, toner and ink).

Multiply these costs by dozens, even hundreds of fax machines for a large enterprise — and it’s clear that removing a costly fax network, in favor of adopting newer technologies such as email, can represent an easy way to cut substantial costs from an organization’s budget.

But unplugging your in-house fax infrastructure makes sense only if 1) your business has an alternative method of communicating via fax when necessary, or 2) you know that none of the companies you work with will require faxing to do business with them. And today, even with fax in decline, most businesses still use fax technology to conduct some aspects of their business.

“42% of UK businesses that still use fax technology say they do so only because the businesses they work with require it.”

—Opinion Matters survey, 2012

Why faxing is here to stay… at least for a while

Fax machines, like Facebook, grew exponentially in use due to the network effect — the simple principle that the more people there are using a given tool, the more valuable that tool is to each user, and the more new users it will attract. When 1,000 people were on Facebook, it had little value to the average person. But by the time Facebook boasted 100 million users, the average person saw enough value to start using it as well.

The reverse of this process — declining usage — does not happen nearly as quickly. That’s because of another simple principle just as powerful as the momentum of the network effect: inertia. Once people or organizations invest in and commit to a new technology, they build up a natural resistance to phasing it out. Fax technology is old enough that many organizations have been using it for decades.

Consider a corporation that for 18 years has been requiring that all signed contracts be delivered by paper fax, or a firm that has developed a complex process of printing every employee time sheet, faxing it to the firm’s payroll vendor, then filing and storing it in its records room. These organizations have enough invested in those paper-based faxing processes — however outdated — that inertia could keep them in place for years.

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So you still need a fax solution to work with some partners — but which one?

Let’s assume that some of your departments will need ongoing access to a fax solution, on at least a semi-regular basis, to do business the way that certain customers, suppliers or partners demand. You have several options — standalone fax machines, in-house fax servers, or a cloud-based hosted fax service.

Option 1: Standalone fax machines in the office

Your organization could install desktop fax machines throughout your offices, giving your employees access to in-house faxing when necessary.

Although a fax machine itself will not cost much, the ongoing costs for maintaining the machine can represent a significant long-term expense — multiplied, of course, by the number of fax machines your business needs. Consider these additional costs for each in-house fax machine:

• Dedicated fax phone line• Transmission costs for sending

and receiving faxes• Toner cartridges, ink and paper• Fax service and maintenance contract• In-house IT resources for training and trouble-

shooting

According to a 2013 report from Davidson Consulting, by far the greatest single expense standalone machines represent for organizations is employee labor: printing documents to be faxed, standing in a queue for their turn, redialing a busy fax number or waiting for a fax.

Even a relatively small number of standalone fax machines, according to Davidson, could cost tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars a year.

Other drawbacks of standalone fax machines:

• Security According to a 2012 Opinion Matters survey,

nearly half of US office workers have read a document left on a fax machine intended for someone else. Paper-based faxing is not secure

• Compliance An even greater problem than the wrong person

peeking at a confidential document left on a fax machine is the regulatory exposure such processes can create for your organization. Paper-based faxing can leave you exposed to non-compliance with such privacy and reporting regulations as HIPAA, GLBA and SOX.

• StorageandRetrieval Standalone fax machines do not create and store

electronic records of the faxes your organization has sent and received. This means your employees will need to file and save paper copies of your faxes, or scan and electronically store them — both time-consuming processes that are also prone to error and offer no standardization or guarantee that you will maintain accurate, easy-to-retrieve records of faxes sent and received.

• Responsiveness Because employees are not typically standing at

the fax machine, they won’t know immediately that a fax has arrived for them unless the sender contacts them. This means your employees might be less responsive to some of your partners than those partners demand — and could even miss important deadlines because they did not see a fax in time. Standalone fax machines can slow your business and your staff’s responsiveness.

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Option 2: In-house fax servers

A fax server is a computer designed exclusively to handle a business’s faxing needs — usually with several ports for dedicated fax phone lines — enabling businesses to send and receive faxes from different fax numbers using a central server. The server takes documents it receives electronically from a company’s network and can then transmit them to be received as paper faxes by the recipient’s fax machine.

According to a 2008 report on fax technologies from the Robert Frances Group, “Analyzing Total Cost of Ownership for Internal vs. Hosted Fax Services,” the overall costs of fax servers can be lower than owning a network of standalone fax machines with an equivalent faxing capacity across an organization. But as report’s data show, fax servers carry their own significant costs —such as expensive design and integration, a very expensive electricity bill, and another complex system for IT to manage.

Fax server upfront capital costs:

• Fax server hardware (see insert at right)• Gateway software• Air units for keeping the units cool• Uninterruptable power supplies• Mounting racks• Design and deployment

Fax server recurring costs:

• Dedicated local fax numbers, toll-free 800 numbers,

• T1 lines, long-distance charges • Recurring software license fees• Data center (rent for dedicated space) • IT maintenance, repair, reporting, backups• Electricity — which over the life of a fax server

costs more than the server itself!

The Robert Frances Group’s analysis shows that, in addition to their high capital and recurring costs, internal fax servers also present other ongoing problems for organizations, including:

• Security Because so much data travels through an

organization’s fax server — often including sensitive company intellectual property or even confidential customer or partner data — fax servers can represent a weak point for data theft. Often, fax often does not receive as much security attention and resources as other technologies, such as corporate email, making fax servers vulnerable.

• Lackofcentralization Because organizations often purchase fax servers

for various departments, and each department manages its own server and fax environment, the organization lacks visibility into the true costs of its fax server solution across the organization. Fax server de-centralization also creates problems with document control. Because fax servers cannot integrate into a company’s document management system, having multiple servers each transmitting its own version of an organization’s documents creates problems with document

lifecycle and management.

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Option 3: A cloud-based hosted fax service

Unlike the fax machine and fax server, a hosted fax service requires no in-house fax hardware, software or dedicated fax phone lines.

With a cloud-based hosted fax service (also known as Internet fax, online fax, or digital fax) your employees can send and receive faxes by email, from a web interface, on their smart phones or other WiFi devices — anywhere they have an Internet connection.

Hosted fax eliminates much of the cost of a fax infrastructure, is highly secure and requires virtually no IT resources to maintain. In fact, a good hosted fax service can typically be set up and deployed in just minutes, and is simple and intuitive enough that most employees will be able to begin using it immediately.

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Nine reasons cloud-based fax is right for your business — even if you don’t use fax often:

1. Loweryourfaxingcosts: Moving from expensive fax infrastructure to hosted

fax significantly lowers your overall fax costs — often by more than 50%.

2. Increase staff productivity: Your staff will no longer need to waste time

standing by the fax machine waiting for an incoming fax, or waiting in line to send one

3. Enhance employee mobility: Your employees can fax anywhere they can

access email — a computer, tablet, smart phone, or any WiFi-enabled device.

4. Improve faxing security: Hosted fax can help ensure your faxes comply

with ever-changing federal regulations such as HIPAA and SOX — through encrypted data transfer, digital tracking with clear audit trails, and secure file storage.

5. Leverageyourexistingdatabases: Hosted fax can integrate easily with your existing

backend systems — such as Salesforce.com, SAP applications, or other databases.

6. Loweryourfaxmaintenance: IT won’t need to maintain fax hardware, extra

phone lines, or faxing tech support. A good hosted fax provider takes care of system upgrades, network monitoring, security and other key support.

7. Deploy easily and inexpensively: Hosted fax takes only minutes to set up.

8. Scaleanytime: Whether your business sends 100 faxes a day or

100,000, a hosted fax service adjusts quickly and seamlessly to your needs.

9. Green your organization: Hosted fax versus paper faxing can save millions

of pages per year — a great addition to your “green” initiatives.




Summary

The network effect, inertia, and other powerful factors keep organizations around the world, in virtually every industry, using fax for at least some portion of their business. And those same factors will ensure that fax remains a part of business document transmission for the foreseeable future. This means that even if your organization does not use fax as a standard method of communication, you can expect that at least some of your organization’s customers, partners and vendors will require you to use fax as a way to communicate with them.

For the reasons outlined, both standalone fax machines and internal fax servers have significant drawbacks — including high costs, security and compliance issues, lack of centralized control, slower response times, and lack of an automatic method for storing and retrieving all documents your organization faxes.

For organizations looking for a standard, efficient fax solution, the simplest, most cost-effective and most secure technology is a hosted, online fax service. Such a service saves your organization significantly on overall fax infrastructure costs, can be deployed across your organization in just minutes, and requires no ongoing maintenance or trouble-shooting from your IT department. Hosted fax is inexpensive, secure, scalable and simple to use. For a declining technology, hosted fax service is the smart choice.

Company Overview

eFax Corporate is part of publicly traded j2 Global, Inc. (NASDAQ: JCOM) — the world’s leading provider of cloud-based, business-critical communications and storage messaging services.

Founded in 1995, j2 Global provides outsourced, value-added messaging and communications services to individuals and businesses around the world. The company offers fax, voicemail and document management solutions, Web-initiated conference calling and unified-messaging and communications services.

j2’s Global network spans more than 49 countries on six continents. Serving more than 12 million subscribers worldwide, j2 has offices in nine cities around the world, accepts payment in twelve currencies, and provides customer support in more than seven languages.

To learn more about eFax Corporate, please visit us at enterprise.efax.com.

You may contact our U.S. Enterprise Sales team at 888-532-9265 (toll free) or 323-817-1155 (direct). In the U.K. contact us at +44 (0) 8707 113311.

To learn more about j2 Global™, please visit http://www.j2global.com.

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