Press Release

   

Killing the Corporate Fax Machine
Outsourced Faxing For Enterprises
How to Make Sure Your Employees Read Their Faxes

Killing the Corporate Fax Machine
BOSTON, Oct. 30 – P.R. Newswire

In today’s fast-paced corporate world, the fax machine poses a direct threat to business efficiency. Its limited abilities in receiving and sending messages causes bottlenecks in document transfer, while its lack of automation demands high levels of dedicated manual labor. For enterprises that require streamlined communications, the machine only slows down crucial functions, while stripping away valuable resources that can otherwise be allocated to a company’s core competencies.

The problem is that, no matter how inefficient fax machines are, faxing itself still plays an important role in communications. Faster than sending information by post and easier than using scanners to email electronic documents, faxing is far from obsolete. In many cases, corporations might conduct business matters with individual customers, small businesses, and global offices that only have access to fax machines.

What, then, can enterprises do to retain faxing capabilities, while getting rid of the physical machine? The answer to this paradox is found in replacing the technology with either in-house or outsourced solutions. Both alternatives enable client users to send faxes directly from their desktops and receive faxes in their email inboxes. Faced with a choice that will impact core functions, customer relations, and operating budgets, corporations want to be sure that they are making the right decision.

As Joseph Sciberras says, “Faxing for large companies is different from consumer faxing. Corporate clients will need to broadcast faxes to hundreds, if not thousands, of recipients simultaneously. Of course this information can be time-sensitive and extremely confidential. That’s why fax machines just won’t cut it – and neither will in-house solutions”.

Mr. Sciberras has spent over 37 years as a salesperson for the electronic fax industry. Currently working for Graphnet, Inc., he personally believes that the best service available for corporate clients comes from small- or medium-sized outsourced providers.

“Outsourced solution vendors are the ones that will pay enough attention to the needs of large business clients because they depend on the revenues month after month. They aren’t selling a one-time product. They don’t require clients to house and train technicians and staff. They don’t make clients purchase new software, hardware, or upgrades, in order to stay up-to-date with the newest technology. Plus, the smaller providers actually try to develop cost-efficient custom solutions for clients, instead of offering some packaged fluff like the bigger giants."

Mr. Sciberras’s employer, Graphnet, Inc. has played a vital role in eliminating the fax machine from various Fortune 1000 companies. With expert inbound and outbound outsourced fax solutions, as well as email, telephony, and SMS capabilities, the company has over three decades of experience in the data transport industry.

When it comes down to it, corporations need something better than a fax machine. They need alternate solutions that retain faxing capabilities, while streamlining business processes, automating non-value added functions, and enhancing overall productivity. However, one must keep in mind that deciding between in-house and outsourced services should be left to the individual companies and their management, as the needs and budgets of each company varies.

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Graphnet, Inc. is a global telecommunications provider that focuses on outsourced, enterprise data transport solutions. Having pioneered the information transfer industry for over 30 years, the company provides inbound and outbound fax services for broadcast and point-to-point purposes. In addition, Graphnet also offers email broadcast, along with voice broadcast and inbound/outbound SMS services. With its own R&D department, proprietary network, and capabilities as an Application Service Provider, Graphnet specializes in developing integrated and unified solutions for various industry needs.

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Outsourced Faxing For Enterprises
Article Provided By: Graphnet, Inc.*

Faxing can get frustrating, especially for corporate businesses. Fax servers get overwhelmed and experience downtimes due to usage, bandwidth and capacity issues. Fax machines are limited in the amount of documents that can be sent or received at a certain time. Both require constant monitoring, maintenance, and upgrading – as well as physical storage space. Clearly, heavy amounts of labor and effort must be dedicated to fax functions, when using in-house solutions or fax machines – taking essential resources away from core business areas.

The problem is that even though faxing is a pain, it is a necessary evil when it comes to transferring important documents. Banks need to send and receive statements, healthcare professionals need to share medical records, insurance companies need to deliver quotes, associations need to connect with their members, and stock traders need to broadcast time-sensitive information. Whatever the industry, fax functions play a crucial role in communicating with and providing services to customers, investors, and partners. Thankfully, in-house fax solutions and fax machines alike can be replaced by a simple and efficient outsourced solution.

Unlike in-house fax servers and fax machines, outsourced solutions don’t take away any human resources from the core business. Instead, by moving fax functions out of the corporation, outsourcing frees employees and IT personnel, enabling the company to reallocate them to well-needed areas. These external solutions also help automate messaging processes, and in doing so, increases worker productivity and decreases the use of manual labor. For this reason, many enterprises have been able to focus more on customer relations and product/service research and development after moving away from traditional fax machines and internal fax solutions.

Financially speaking, outsourced solutions can also be much more cost-efficient than the alternatives. While fax machines are not cost-efficient at all for large enterprises that require bulk data transport, in-house solutions do save corporations a lot of money. However, the initial investment for in-house solutions can be massive because hardware, software, and training all require capital, whereas the initial investment for outsourced solutions is much less – especially when various outsourced solutions providers compete for customers.

In the long run, in-house solutions can prove to be a good financial investment, provided that cost and usage expectations are met. Yet, often, unexpected costs occur when companies find themselves maintaining their system internally, revising their legacy software, and paying for frequent staff trainings. Additionally, overestimating capacity demand for the in-house technology may result in overspending. For these reasons, outsourced solutions are usually a safer choice. With little or no extra cost, they can provide expert support staff, software and system integration services, and external maintenance and management.

Outsourcing faxing processes, as well as general information transport processes, achieves business-to-business and business-to-consumer communications in an optimized and cost-efficient manner. As technology continues to advance, keeping up with the newest developments can prove to be a hassle for enterprises who want to maximize their ROI. Thankfully, external vendors offer services that remove the need to sacrifice time and resources. A good outsourced solutions provider will use only the latest technology, ensuring that client business processes are streamlined. In essence, in-house fax solutions and traditional fax machines lack the adaptability that outsourced solutions can provide.

In the end, it is up to the individual enterprise to decide what type of faxing solution is best suited for company needs. Fax machines provide a cheap solution when businesses rarely fax anything, but will fail to perform when usage increases heavily. In-house solutions can replace fax machines and simplify messaging processes, yet can cause long-term liabilities when unexpected costs and problems arise. Outsourced solutions seemingly offer the best value, hosting its own facilities, developing its own technologies, integrating and customizing services and products to meet client needs, and streamlining enterprise business processes – at the sole price of direct company control over fax and messaging technicalities. If businesses are willing to leave these functions in the hands of outside providers, then outsourced faxing just might be the best solution for the corporate world.


*Graphnet, Inc. is a global telecommunications provider that focuses on outsourced, enterprise data transport solutions. Having pioneered the information transfer industry for over 30 years, the company provides inbound and outbound fax services for broadcast and point-to-point purposes. In addition, Graphnet also offers email broadcast, along with voice broadcast and inbound/outbound SMS services. With its own R&D department, proprietary network, and capabilities as an Application Service Provider, Graphnet specializes in developing integrated and unified solutions for various industry needs.

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How to Make Sure Your Employees Read Their Faxes
Leading Business Solutions Provider Introduces New Service Feature

New York City (DATE) – Graphnet Inc., a pioneer in the data transport industry, today announced the addition of a new feature to its inbound fax-to-email service. The feature, called the Failsafe Delivery Service (FDS) option, ensures that incoming electronic fax messages are read in a timely manner.

Allowing clients to specify a timeframe during which received faxes should be read, FDS monitors such messages, so that if they are not opened within that period, duplicate messages will be sent to an alternate failsafe address. Clients can incorporate their business hours and vacation days into the system, configuring the FDS option to only count working hours and not after-hour periods, weekends, or holidays.

This means that if a client company wants its employees to read their electronic fax messages within 2 hours of receipt, it will set a timeframe of 2 hours. If the company’s hours are 9am-5pm, Monday through Friday, then messages received, for example, by 10am Thursday will have a timeframe that ends by 12pm that same day. Meanwhile, messages received by 4pm on Friday will have a timeframe that ends Monday at 10am, not Friday at 6pm – allowing employees the flexibility to check their messages on Monday morning, instead of being hassled with duplicate messages over the weekend.

“This is revolutionary because, as far as I know, FDS is the first feature of its kind that basically tracks when a fax email is opened and consequently undertakes a failsafe procedure when that message is not opened within a specified timeframe or if that message is not delivered properly,” says Larry Cohen, Graphnet’s Product Manger. “It’s amazingly useful because electronic delivery of faxes is never guaranteed – sometimes a user’s inbox is full and the fax bounces, sometimes the email program filters out the fax as spam, and sometimes the message gets blocked or experiences errors.”

Inbound fax-to-email services work by linking a fax number with an email destination. All faxes sent to that specific number are thereby converted into an email message by the service provider, who then transmits that message to the client’s inbox. The problem here is that sometimes the email never gets to the client because of technical issues, such as the ones detailed above. FDS addresses these shortcomings by protecting this last link between the client’s inbox and Graphnet’s servers; immediately notifying Graphnet personnel if an error occurs in message transmission.

What makes FDS unique, however, is not the procedure taken in event of delivery errors, but rather the procedure taken when the received message is not opened on time. Able to send duplicate, trackable messages to alternate emails and failsafe contacts automatically, FDS takes a step forward in providing customer-oriented, quality services for fax-to-email solutions.

As Mr. Cohen explains, “Even when messages are received without technical problems, employees might forget to read their faxes, they might be out of the office, or the fax could have time-sensitive information. Using FDS, companies can make sure that their workers read these documents. That’s the real added-value of this feature.”

For more information, please contact Mr. Larry Cohen, Product Manager, at: lcohen@graphnet.com.


Graphnet, Inc. is an Application Service Provider that develops business solutions for enterprise clients. Specializing in messaging services, Graphnet offers systems integration bundled with data transport. Graphnet operates and manages its own proprietary IP network, has its own R&D department, and provides solutions that never require third-party software.

Graphnet offers consultation and custom development services to ensure that solutions integrate seamlessly, meet various client requirements, optimize client business processes, and reduce budget costs - increasing overall ROI. Our facilities host outsourced client gateway servers and switching systems, while our support center is accessible 365-days a year, 24x7.

Graphnet is one of the most experienced and recognized information technology companies in the business messaging and electronic document delivery industry. With more than 30 years of experience as a voice and data carrier, Graphnet provides reliable, scalable, and secure solutions to Fortune 500 enterprises. Graphnet is a privately held company.


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