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Out With Old Facsimiles, In With Online Efficiencies
July 1, 2008No more scurrying down the hall to retrieve confidential faxes or fishing for lost pages? For the Leavitt Group, a Cedar City, Utah-based insurance firm that works with its affiliate agencies to provide risk management and risk transfer solutions, the death knell for traditional faxing may have sounded. Upon reevaluating its business processes and technologies, the insurer honed in last year on an area in which it could trim some fat: faxing. Since then, it has gradually phased out traditional fax machines and reaped the cost, convenience and structural benefits from Internet faxing, which enables users to send and receive faxes through their e-mail accounts or a secure online server anywhere they can get an Internet connection. In an industry teeming with small offices, independent workers and paper documents, the Leavitt Group’s group-wide standardization drive may not be an aberration for long.
“In the insurance industry, faxing is still an important part of the business,” explains Randy Wilson, an IT consultant in the Leavitt Group’s service division, who assessed the insurer’s cost and productivity challenges in its fax environment. The Leavitt Group typically sends and receives some 20,000 faxed pages per month in one of its busiest offices alone, either through a fax machine or fax server. Through Internet faxing, it has found efficiencies in myriad ways, from reducing the need for a gatekeeper to review and distribute faxes to hacking costs spent on phone lines, which, for faxing, each typically run $40 monthly in a remote office. It also slashed paper and toner costs.
The insurer had proposed network fax solutions — another popular option for those looking to shun stand-alone fax machines — in the past to some of its agencies, but because of upfront costs and hardware management issues, these solutions were too expensive, according to Wilson. Though hard figures are not available, “in almost every case, the hard costs are about the same or less by moving to MyFax, and the soft cost savings are huge,” he says.
With Internet faxing, no infrastructure needs to be built or operated, while pricing also is more straightforward, according to the report, “Analyzing Total Cost of Ownership for Internal vs. Hosted Fax Services,” by the Westport, Conn.-based consulting firm Robert Frances Group (RFG). Internet faxing is less expensive than fax servers due to the latter’s significant cost in areas such as licensing, personnel, implementation and integration. In its analysis, the firm found that, when sending 10,000 faxes per day (using three servers), a typical company’s annual fax server environment could cost $1,019,000, while in a similar scenario Internet fax services would range from $75,000 to $365,000—bringing an annual savings of between 49% and 64% for those choosing the latter option. At the same time, fax servers have greater hidden costs, “such as the requirement (or unknown existence) of shadow IT staff for support, and additional unplanned costs associated with development, testing and, especially, systems integration,” according to RFG’s study.
MyFax charges $10 per month (retail) per individual user. For $10, one can send 100 pages and receive 200 pages. Price scales by the number of pages and the number of users, and the more fax numbers the company adopts, the more it is charged. However, just as cell phone vendors provide free minutes, MyFax throws in a number of free pages for every fax number or subscriber.
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