This International Office Equipment and Imaging Company had multiple requirements for distributing and receiving fax. With diverse streams to its business and multiple technology platforms within the organisation, there was a need to choose a supplier that provided the flexibility to function in this varied environment. The broad options facing the organisation were to purchase and maintain in-house fax server technology, or use an outsourced service such as Prodocom. As the requirements were many and varied, the in-house fax server option would have necessitated the purchase of multiple software modules and on-going support and maintenance. Using Prodocom presented the organization with no initial cost, nor any support and maintenance expense. Prodocom were able to custom build solutions that fitted the requirements exactly and have since added further capabilities. The client pays only a very competitive delivery rate for each fax, a payment that would still have been required even had the Client gone to the significant expense of purchasing and maintaining in-house technology.

Requirement 1 - Desktop Faxing

The Finance division call centre would receive frequent requests for copies of invoices and statements to be faxed to clients. Significant time was being spent printing and manually faxing these copies.

Prodocom provided free desktop software that enabled operators to simply add the recipients fax number and use the embedded print utility to automatically fax the document.

Requirement 2 - Inbound Fax

The Leasing Division required its client base to fax usage data pertaining to its leased equipment, for billing purposes. Thousands of these faxes would then require manual data entry, which is a laborious process.

Prodocom inbound fax service allowed the organization to publish a solitary fax number, behind which 30 ports could operate, avoiding congestion at busy periods. Faxes were then captured as Group 4 Tif images and passed to an OCR package that automatically captured 90% of the required data, providing major improvements in speed and accuracy of data collection.

Requirement 3 - Automated Fax

The accounts department required an automated delivery method for remittance advice and other documents. A Forms package currently produced the document ready for printing and archiving as a PDF.

With a minor amendment to the PDF file that was already being created to include the destination fax number and account number, Prodocom were able to receive the PDF file via FTP, read the fax number and other variables from the PDF, while converting to and delivering as the document as a fax. Notification of delivery status was immediately posted to the Prodocom Viewlog site as well as being passed back directly via FTP.