Fast implementation of Fenestrae^® Faxination^® Server gives Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein an immediate advantage in its investment and issue business.

The company
Dresdner Bank AG was founded in 1872. It has subsidiaries in over 70 countries and in all major financial centers in the world. Dresdner Kleinwort Wassterstein is the investment banking division of Dresdner Bank AG. It has subsidiaries in several countries, including Germany, United Kingdom and the United States.

The Challenge
Many Fortune 500 companies like Dresdner Kleinwort Wassterstein spend, on average, $13.6m in fax communication bills. In July 1996, the foreign exchange division of Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein, Global Markets - middle office, installed Limit Order Application (LORA) an electronic order system based on Microsoft Windows NT. This automated workflow replaced the previous telephone and fax-based processes. The bank first considered implementing different types of integrative software to solve the main problem in allocating and taking up orders between different trading rooms around the world. The strong combination of email and fax, coupled with the fact that 90 per cent of all communication between companies is still fax, influenced Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein's decision to implement Microsoft^® Exchange and a fax solution that would integrate with it.

Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein searched for a fax solution that would extend the Exchange client/server environment in a useful and cost-effective way. It wanted a solution with minimal management costs and end-user training. The fax solution should not only be secure, reliable and able to reduce the telecommunications costs considerably but it should also provide a low total cost of ownership. In addition, the universal bank preferred an open system with enough flexibility for integration and future expansion in communication technology.

The Fenestrae Faxination Server advantage
After a comparison of different manufacturers and suppliers, Dresdner Kleinwort Wassterstein chose to implement the Fenestrae Faxination Server for Microsoft Exchange. It was the only product they reviewed that truly fulfilled their requirement to integrate fax capabilities within their existing e-mail environments. Full integration with Exchange meant that the company's employees would be able to send and receive faxes and other types of messages on their desktop, just like e-mail. The Fenestrae solution promised a fast, easy roll out and deployment and even faster return on investment. It enabled immediate savings through significantly reduced fax transmission costs by bundling fax traffic to certain destinations and sending faxes during off-peak hours.

The security risks of manual mailroom sorting and delivery are also eliminated thanks to direct inbound routing. This enables increased handling speed, improved customer response time, reduced labor costs and a significant reduction in delivery errors. Fenestrae Faxination Server's routing feature also offers extended custom routing that enables Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein to route incoming messages to a Microsoft Exchange-based workflow and automatically include custom forms.

"The fax solution that we wanted"
Fenestrae's solution has now been up and running since July 1996, where it started with a pilot of 50 users in Frankfurt. In September 1996, after the successful completion of the pilot, Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein extended the roll out to include the implementation for 900 users in Frankfurt.

Hermann-Josef Müller, middle office communications team leader, Dresdner Bank AG, says: "Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein Global Markets is using Fenestrae Faxination Server to automate the way traders and sales people are sending faxes to customers. The program does not involve new client software, which is important. We required a system that would save time and that was intuitive to use. With Fenestrae Faxination Server being totally transparent to the user and closely integrated in the standard Exchange client and administration, we have the fax solution that we wanted."

Fenestrae Faxination Server is used in combination with Microsoft Exchange 5.0 and allows users to send and receive all fax messages in their personal inbox, just like normal email. At Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein, Fenestrae Faxination Server and Microsoft Exchange run on the same Windows NT 4.0-based server that is handling over 1,000 users. The server incorporates two Brooktrout faxboards, intelligent faxboards that manage fax traffic, and is connected to eight phone lines that carry all the traffic.

Low total cost of ownership
The use of the Fenestrae solution has significant improved end-user productivity. Dresdner Kleinwort Wassterstein has reduced transmission costs, especially for international traffic between trading offices. Because Fenestrae Faxination Server's system administration is completely integrated with the Microsoft Exchange Administration, the company's system administrators have negligible maintenance on the fax server, whereas adding a non-natively integrated fax server would have doubled the Microsoft Exchange maintenance costs.

Dresdner Kleinwort Wassterstein also benefits from the low total cost of ownership thanks to the solution's full integration in Microsoft Exchange. Research has indicated the total cost of ownership, per user, is $21.34 over three years compared with $980 for a traditional fax server. Together with the savings in telecommunications costs, the investment in Fenestrae Faxination Server was repaid within a couple of months.

Confidentiality and security are essential for business critical information that the traders and dealers in the Kleinwort Wasserstein division of foreign exchange have to distribute. Faxes that are sent and received within the Microsoft Exchange environment, are guaranteed confidentiality. The Kleinwort Wasserstein division can easily track all fax traffic and analyze traffic patterns and costs. These costs can, where required, be charged to accounts or specific projects.

Saving money daily
These days, workflow processes are faster, easier and more effective and have a greater return on investment. Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein Global Markets' decision to choose the Fenestrae Faxination Server solution is an excellent example of how long-term planning with the right technology achieves successful results.

"With the implementation of Fenestrae Faxination Server for Microsoft Exchange, Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein has made workflow processes more effective and we are saving money on a daily basis," concludes Müller.