Fax management
- Article 17 of 26
- M-iD, April 2005
Facsimilie machines are still in widespread use, and so long as they remain so, the documents they produce must be properly managed.
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At a time when most IT directors, CIOs and information managers are weighed down with concerns about email, instant messaging, and multiple compliance regulations, the fax continues to spew out orders and invoices, forgotten in a corner of the office.
Even the post gets more attention in most organisations, and faxing remains something few think of, many consider redundant and the rest regard as somebody else's problem. Yet faxing remains an integral part of many office environments, whether it is as a way of taking and making orders, of communicating with customers and suppliers or simply exchanging documents.
Many organisations have therefore overlooked the fax's overwhelming importance to compliance, security, workflow, customer relationship management (CRM), enterprise resource management (ERP) and records management, as well as the possible cost savings available to the organisation by integrating the fax with their IT systems.
Fax servers
There are, of course, two kinds of faxes: incoming and outgoing. Each has its own integration issues and benefits, but both ultimately require a fax server (see box), unless the organisation chooses to use managed services instead. When an organisation deploys fax servers instead of having stand-alone fax machines, the fax servers sit at the end of the organisation's fax lines and send or receive faxes.
Depending on the degree of sophistication of the server, faxes sent from within the company from staff PCs can be routed over the Internet to a third-party or sent by the fax server itself to the destination.
In combination with a universal messaging system, a CRM system or global address list, the fax server can determine the most cost-effective route, sending the fax as an email if an email address is known for the contact or scheduling the fax to go at a particular time of day or by a particular route if it will be cheaper (using voice over IP, for example).
However, one of the main considerations is the source of the outgoing fax. Virtually all fax servers for outgoing faxes provide printer drivers for PCs. Once installed, these printer drivers allow the print output of any application to be diverted to the fax server. This means that anything that a member of staff can print can also be faxed, says Mark Reynolds, UK managing director of Topcall.
Products are therefore differentiated in terms of their ability to integrate with document, content or records management systems, as well as workflow or ERP systems. As a result, most enterprise-grade fax server vendors offer connectors from their products into other corporate IT systems for both incoming and outgoing faxes.
By making desktop faxing the predominant way of creating faxes, rather than print out and fax, sizeable savings can be generated in both employee time and consumables such as ink and paper. By ensuring that all parts of the process are digital and hooked into a records management system, the organisation can also ensure that it is meeting compliance regulations as far as possible - an almost impossible task with standard faxing.
However, there still remains a considerable amount of faxing that cannot easily be done from the desktop. For example, if someone wishes to write on a fax and then send it back with the additional comments. While it is possible to print the document, write on it and then scan s it back in for faxing, such a process will increase costs by wasting time and resources, and end up infuriating staff.
Multifunction devices
Companies that want to ensure all their outgoing faxes are conveyed via their fax servers should look at the latest multifunction devices that incorporate printing, scanning and faxing in one unit.
Some devices, such as those from Xerox, Canon and Ricoh, are capable of integrating directly with fax servers, while presenting a standard fax interface to employees: all the employees have to do is feed in the fax and dial the destination number - the fax server then takes over.
Paul Birkett, Xerox Global Services' UK business solutions manager, says that such devices will often require user ID and passwords for security and accounting purposes, something that makes them highly applicable for compliance. Other devices can be configured to scan the fax as it is sent, so the image can be deposited in a records management system.
While outgoing faxing may therefore be almost trivial, incoming faxing remains significantly harder to manage for several reasons. A standard fax machine will typically be a departmental or company fax: all faxes for the department or the company arrive at the same machine. Often, however, organisations would prefer more intelligent routing with the right fax going directly to the right employee.
However, being able to determine who the right employee is from a flat, potentially low quality 200dpi black and white image (potentially only 20 kilobytes in size) of some handwritten text is a difficult, if not impossible task.
Fortunately, there are a number of ways to simplify the problem. Digital lines, such as ISDN, are able to support multiple fax numbers. As a result, companies that switch to digital lines can give employees individual fax numbers. The incoming fax server can then route the incoming faxes to the correct employee or workflow. However, making the switch to digital is often harder than it might seem.
“Sometimes there's a crossover between IT and telecoms,” says Peter Steggall, sales manager at Castelle AMS. “IT don't want it. Telecoms don't want to lose control. So sometimes there's friction there. It can be quite contentious, particularly if there's a third-party PBX supplier involved that offers something similar that the customer doesn't want.”
Organisations making the switch need to appoint someone who can supervise both IT and telecoms and get them to co-operate - particularly on the thorny subject of whose budget will pay for the work and accept the benefits. This particular argument can spread to other departments, since faxing and fax supplies will often be paid for by individual departments and their budgets.
Content management
Dealing with the content of the fax is the next stage. Handwriting recognition systems are not viable in such settings, so a better angle of attack is to get as many incoming faxes sent in on standard forms, rather than handwritten.
Until recently, Manchester City Council's public health inspectors used to provide handwritten faxes for notifying their department of closure notices. Secretaries would then have to input the information in the faxes manually, creating a two-week backlog on closures and increasing insurance liabilities.
Xerox's Birkett and his team redesigned the forms so that the necessary information could be provided through tick boxes. Different forms can be identified using barcodes (or unique 'glyphs' or ID numbers) and the system can then use that to recognise which zones of the fax contain the data for entering into databases using optical character and mark recognition.
Providing employees, other branches and departments, suppliers and customers with these standardised forms can cut costs very quickly once the system is up and running.
While OCR may not be sufficiently good to process handwriting, it is however, good enough to recognise typed text on faxes. “People used to have high expectations of OCR - everyone expected it to recognise handwriting. But it was appalling. But then expectations dropped, recognition improved and they've met in the middle. OCR has improved and people don't expect the world,” says Castelle AMS's Steggall.
Imaging systems, such as those from Kofax that are commonly integrated with scanning applications, will often use more than one OCR engine, compare the results, and if they do not agree, they will pass on the results to an exception process. “For best practice, you'll probably want a user validation stage,” says Bashrat Din, Northern Europe managing director of fax server vendor Esker. “Most companies are more comfortable providing tools to help users, rather than complete automation.”
The exception process will need to cope with faxes not provided on standard forms, that are not legible enough to be OCR'd with confidence, and handwritten faxes. This should be almost the only place where human input is needed, however, a good rule of thumb is to expect costs from manual processing of faxes to be halved by automation, say analysts.
These costs can be reduced even further if there is an existing production scanning process in place. While setting up from scratch a fax input process that will automate the input of data into corporate systems will take some work, any company that already has a production scanning process in place will find that faxing fits into it very easily.
“If you've invested in workflow, just adding a fax server to the front of that is easy-peasy,” says Jonathan Symons, managing director of software and services supplier ITESoft.
The degree of integration required will also be a factor in implementation time and costs. A standard, out-of-the-box implementation may only take a few weeks to get up and running normally, says Symons, but a full blown implementation that requires complex business rules, validation of data when it is entered into systems will take considerably longer.
For that kind of integration project, he estimates between 60 and 100 man days of effort are required to complete the work. But it should pay for itself within a year or 18 months.
Faxing may be the forgotten communications medium, but it remains a vital business tool to many organisations. Bringing it under control needs to be on everyone's agenda.
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