The fax market is continuing to expand, and the numbers are astonishing. International Data Corporation (IDC) expects worldwide fax transmission minutes to grow from 255 billion in 1995 to 647 billion by the end of 2000. The number of pages of fax documents are increasing at a rate of nearly 22 percent a year. Add that figure to overwhelming costs (productivity, time and consumables) of stand alone fax machines and you have a compelling argument to streamline business processes, expedite the communication to suppliers and customers, and reduce costs.
Most business-critical applications reside on legacy host computers, such as IBM Mainframes and AS/400 systems. Purchasing, inventory, order entry, financial and other enterprise applications generate huge volumes of business-to-business communications - purchase orders, acknowledgements, invoices, pick lists, shipping reports, bills of lading, loan documents and other critical business documents.
What`s become more evident however is the growing number of companies are implementing ERP systems such as those from SAP, Oracle, PeopleSoft and Baan. The problem is that enterprise applications, including ERP systems, don`t address document delivery. Most companies must rely on the postal service or general-purpose facsimile to deliver documents. Traditionally this is a labour-intensive, manual process that involves printing, bursting, folding, stuffing envelopes and mailing documents or printing documents, taking them to the fax machine, waiting in line and often waiting to confirm that they are faxed to the recipients.
As a result Voicematix has announced the launch of its RightFAX powered ERP Fax Solution which covers the likes of AS/400, Baan, Oracle, PeopleSoft and SAP environments.
Kevin Hurwitz, Chief Operating officer of Voicematix says, "Manual document delivery has proven to be extremely costly. In large companies the volumes are huge. All one has to do is compare the cost of sending a document via the postal service which is over R2, 50 (including materials and labour) compared to faxing costs at approximately 50 cents a document. The business benefit and cost saving is overwhelmingly evident."
With the growing emphasis on speed, mail delivery is often too slow. The postal service typically takes several days to deliver documents domestically and significantly longer for international deliveries. The result is longer lead times for purchasing, which may necessitate maintaining higher inventories to compensate for delays in receiving shipments. Delivery of invoices also takes several days, increasing days sales outstanding (DSO), the number of days` worth of sales in accounts receivable (or average collection period for accounts receivable). Furthermore, documents sent by mail are subject to loss, so critical orders may not be filled on time or payment of invoices may be delayed. Confirmations that purchase orders were received may also be delayed, and much time may elapse before a company realises that a critical document wasn`t delivered.
While manual fax delivery is significantly faster than mail delivery, it doesn`t adequately handle the high volumes. It is time consuming and prone to error. For example, faxes may inadvertently be sent to the wrong recipient. Some companies use general-purpose LAN fax servers to handle production fax. These servers, however, are targeted toward managing faxes from desktops and integrating fax capabilities with e-mail systems. They are not designed to handle the high volume found in production fax environments. Nor are they designed to integrate easily with host applications. As a result, much manual intervention is still required.
Jeremy Hewson, Chief Technology Officer at Voicematix continues, "Our ERP Fax solution will have a significant impact on the business communications landscape. It is emerging as a key enabling technology for next-generation document delivery strategies. It provides high-volume, low-cost, real-time electronic document delivery directly from existing mainframe and midrange applications to fax machines. It turns any standard fax machine in the world into a remote printer for the host system, linked directly with legacy applications."
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