Companies can streamline their compliance processes and save hours or days by converting their faxes into a searchable format, says Craig Freer of Vox Amvia.
“South African businesses process hundreds of millions of fax pages every month,” says Freer. “Lay people tend to think fax is old-fashioned, but because it is more secure than email and offers an audit trail on document movement, it is still the best way to transmit any kind of sensitive or confidential information.”
Freer says several pieces of legislation passed in recent years have increased the relevance of fax, including the Financial Intelligence Centres Act (FICA), the Consumer Protection Act, the National Credit Act and soon also the Protection of Personal Information Act.
The result of all this legislation, says Freer, “is that we all need to be incredibly rigorous about protecting, tracking and archiving any communication that contains confidential information, especially financial and medical information. Fax is the best way to preserve security and maintain an audit trail that will stand up in court, which is why it's still so popular.”
There has traditionally been one problem, however: Because a fax is a graphic image, it cannot be indexed by a search engine. As a result, finding an old fax when a dispute arises can be a very long and painful process.
Fortunately, says Freer, “optical character recognition (OCR) technology has reached the point where it's possible to turn every single fax into a fully searchable PDF document, even if you're receiving thousands a day.”
This in turn means that fax content can be easily searched from any desktop, using any search engine. “If you're trying to confirm the details of a transaction that was made weeks or months ago, having access to the content of your faxes can cut days off the discovery process,” he says.
The main users of Vox Amvia's searchable fax technology are corporate clients with RightFax 10 fax server solutions, says Freer; “but small and medium-sized companies can now also enjoy the same benefits with our Stratus hosted fax server platform.”
As well as making faxes fully searchable, says Freer, OCR also makes it possible to route faxes with a high degree of accuracy. “If your fax contains a barcode, a reference number or even a name, it's easy to deliver it directly to the person it should reach, or into the right business system. You can achieve this even if you only have one fax number per department, or for the whole company.”
Share
Editorial contacts