Texaco Benelux
Since 1902 the Texaco brand has been seen in the Netherlands. Today there are 560 service stations with a market share of 12 percent.
Prior to the Fenestrae Faxination Server implementation, Texaco's mail-room staff had to recognize destinations and hand-deliver more than 2,000 fax pages a week. This was not only time consuming, the delivery of faxes to the recipient was also delayed. In addition, the costs for maintaining separate fax machines on every location were very high.
At Texaco, Fenestrae Faxination Server is integrated with Microsoft Mail Server. The company wanted complete transparency for end-users. "E-mail destinations are listed in public and private address books, and can include any e-mail user, fax or telex-destination. The distribution list function of the e-mail systems enables users to send faxes to multiple destinations, with or without internal copies, and from any computer system, including Texaco's mainframes," says Lieven van de Velde.
Fenestrae Faxination Server enables a 60 per cent reduction on fax staffing costs, without doubling training and annual maintenance costs. Van de Velde continues: "At Texaco Benelux, there has been no need for user training. End-users simply make entries for fax destinations in their personal address books, and the rest is no different from sending a regular e-mail message." E-mail traffic is easier to control and communication-costs are better managed. Fax servers can also be set up to queue international faxes and send them at cheaper 'off peak' hours at extra low rates.
Texaco Benelux has two Fenestrae Faxination Servers interconnected through the existing wide area network. "This has removed all international fax-traffic between the offices in Belgium and the Netherlands," says van de Velde. "Also, fax forwarding within the corporation has really become a file-transfer over the existing network, at no incremental cost." Most fax servers concentrate on outgoing fax messages but even more money can be saved by automating inbound fax traffic. Traditionally, faxes are received on a central fax machine or printer and hand delivered to the addressee, a labor-intensive and slow approach that also introduces security risks. Quite often it might just take a few minutes to fax from one office to another but can sometimes take a full day or more to reach its final destination.
After installing Fenestrae Faxination Server, all Texaco Benelux employees now have a virtual and personal fax number and receive incoming faxes directly as an electronic copy from anywhere at any time. Fax delivery is immediate, does not require any paper and is secure. Employees have their personal fax numbers listed on their business cards. The number of hand-delivered faxes has been reduced by more than 80 per cent. In addition, savings in paper, reduced administration overhead, removal of existing fax equipment, and fewer international calls have returned the investment within 10 months.
Less measurable benefits such as staffing, immediate delivery of incoming faxes, and ease of use for mobile staff, have contributed even more to the value of this system. Fax automation offers tremendous cost savings and advantages over traditional fax. By selecting a true e-mail-based solution, the administrative, support and training costs are significantly reduced. Advanced features such as desktop delivery of faxes (direct inbound routing) can be implemented easily and will reduce staffing requirements and security threats. Throw in ISDN-based automatic inbound routing (or DID/DDI) and corporate faxing becomes what it already should be: a fast and cost-efficient way to communicate with customers and business partners.