Optimization techniques at managing faxes for small and medium business

Optimization techniques at managing faxes for small and medium business

Small and medium business from health, legal, financial services, logistics or transportation receive a big number of faxes everyday. As with all SMBs, any of these received faxes can be crucial for their business.

Normally there is one allocated person/ employee in charge or receiving, registering, storing and assuring a back-up for the received faxes. In case these faxes are received via a regular fax machine, there are a couple of problems that this person might encounter:

the fax machine is down and no fax is being received for the next couple of hours

Received documents have to be tagged, stored and a back-up for these documents has to be assured. While this is a time consuming task in case the faxes are received on paper and need to be stored in paper based format, it can be totally inefficient if these faxes are to be stored in an electronic environment (for different purposes: collaboration, back-up etc)

While the receiving-tagging-storing-backup process is usually time consuming, the allocated time and costs can be drastically reduced together with improving security and backup flaws that normal fax machines trigger.

One way to improve the above described situations is to use Visendo Fax@Mail. It has been a real success in the past 5 years because it transforms the above described situations in short and easy to deploy processes. Together with the new version Fax@Mail 10, released in June 2010, it goes even further in terms of process optimization: multiple ISDN channels, runs as a service, better graphic evaluation, supports virtual environments and other important features.

Further, we will talk about 5 essential points to optimize the discussed fax-receiving-storing-back-up process.

Improve employee productivity by decreasing the time spent and the complexity of her individual tasks (concerning the fax receiving process)

Overcoming temporary or permanent failure of fax machines

Energy savings and virtualization

Minimum IT resources needed: no SMTP servers to send and receive the emails that have the faxes attached

Using the application as a service: manage everything online

Let's discuss these 5 techniques in detail while keeping an eye on what interests us the most: process optimization.

1. Improve employee productivity

The first aspect to be taken into account is the productivity of the allocated employee that manages the received faxes through the entire process of receiving, indexing, storing and assuring a back-up.

While this is normally time consuming and prone to fallouts (more and more people complain that their faxing machine is "down"), it is an essential task that needs to be done with an eye on details, especially in cases of legal, financial and health organizations.

Basically, when the fax is being received in the inbox, it can easily be indexed and stored while a back-up is automatically being stored on your server (local machine). This could save up to 80% of the time spent at receiving faxes on paper, scanning them, storing and indexing them by hand.

2. "My fax machine is dead; how can I further receive my faxes?"

While this happens vey often, for many companies a lost or misplaced fax because of technical problems of the fax machine can be a lost customer. And for SMBs, a customer can make the difference between a positive cash flow and a negative one.

With Visendo fax@Mail, even if the faxing machine is down, the faxes can still be received by email, hence saving valuable time and prospective customers.

3. Save energy and be green while integrating fax@Mail 10 with you virtual environment

Fax@Mail 10 can easily be integrated with virtual environments and FoIP applications, hence saving energy and assuring a green mark. This comes along with the entire green IT hype that suggests that companies should spare more and more resources while being as efficient as possible.

4. No SMTP servers required.

Normally for a Fax to be sent to your inbox, a request by a SMTP server has to be made. While SMTP servers are slowly being replaced by more modern technologies and while they are still expensive applications (e.g. Microsoft Exchange) that small companies can't afford, fax@Mail 10 can manage the faxes by direct MX sending. This ensures cost savings and flexibility - the system can be configured for SMTP servers as well.

5. Fax@Mail 10 can now be used as a service.

This has been required by many customers and testers. It is simply the trend and people are starting the see this as a more flexible and easy to use possibility. Any small company will be able to use its fax@Mail 10 online, from the internet browser.

Of course, there are more features that can improve processes and help SMB overcome the difficulties of receiving important faxes: accessible price, support for Microsoft Office applications etc.

In conclusion, in order to optimize the fax-receiving-tagging-storing-back-up process, bearing in mind the importance of individual faxes for small and medium business, SMBs need to find ways to: improve the allocated employee's productivity, to overcome the situations when fax machines are down, to reduce costs by energy savings and to be able to run all this service online with out any auxiliary expensive software (like SMTP clients).

POST COMMENT

4 Reasons Why You Should Use MYOB Software to Build a Healthier Business A Mortgage Note Buyer Can Provide You With Instant Cash Bad Credit Money Loans – Easy Cash For Low Credit Worthy Persons 5 Ways MYOB Improves Your Business Productivity Simple Steps to Producing Compelling Business Cards Can your 'EGO' hurt your business' success How Document Comparison Products Help in Business Management Small cash loans: Avail funds instantly for urgencies Your Guide On Texas Arrest Records How to make effective business training to training purposes - corporate training, training purposes - education sector Enterprise Search Application Importance in Business Lucrative Home Business- Feeling of Independence When Do You Hand Out Business Cards?