IWH Industries Fax Transition Initiative (FTI) Improving The Bottom Line in Business to Business

IWH Industries Fax Transition Release

Fax machines have been around since the 1960’s when Xerox introduced the first commercial version of the modern fax machine. Since its inception, many methods have spawned to improve the way we communicate in the modern world. At their core, these modern methods such as email, have been established to improve efficiency, security, accessibility and a business’s bottom line. Below we present our fax transition initiative to facilitate migrating to these newer methods. Adoption is widely growing with only a small percentage of businesses left behind.

Understanding the Process

Today’s modern world demands more from businesses. Often this entails a deep learning curve into newer methods, increased costs and complexity. Fortunately, this is not the case with faxing as the process we are all accustomed to has only been made easier.

The Traditional Approach

The standard faxing process involves a few simple steps:

1.       Get up or walk to the fax machine

2.       Enter a phone number

3.       Insert or feed the piece of paper you printed/wrote

4.       Press start or signal the fax to transmit the copy

5.       Wait for a response

6.       OPTIONAL: confirm with the recipient that the fax was received and is legible

While the process is simple, there are a few unnecessary steps here. Can you spot where improvements can be made? Most people do not see the value of improving the process until metrics are added to the equation.

Take the following example as guide:

1.       It takes me roughly 15 seconds to go to the fax. I walk fast, the fax is near the front of the office. Note: this doesn’t include dodging Bobby at the water cooler. If he catches anyone it’s game over, guy can talk up a storm.

2.       I must write down the phone number and hope I didn’t write it incorrectly, then enter it. I take about 10 seconds to do so. I am very tech savvy so hitting keys is second nature to me.

3.       I insert the piece of paper and align it nicely so it faxes well. Roughly 5 seconds.

4.       I press start and wait for the dial tone to hit/the machine to process each paper. I usually fax at minimum 2 copies and the process takes around 10 seconds per page (includes dial). Overall 20 seconds.

5.       I regularly call the client to make sure they received my fax. A quick confirmation call takes me 1 minute unless the client decides to talk my ear off. I like living on my own time so that can become quite distracting.

Overall time invested to fax 2 pages: 15+10+5+20+60 = 110 seconds. So almost 2 minutes. Ok, so two minutes doesn’t seem that bad. Except that my business relies on fax heavily and we are sending on average 10 faxes per person each day. There are 3 employees that work in the office.

Combining our average times, we learn that we spend roughly one (1) hour a day sending faxes and this doesn’t include our busy season. In a single month, we spend 20 hours faxing!

That is 20 hours that could have been invested better.

Have I caught your attention now?

A Better Approach

Earlier I asked, can you spot where improvements can be made?

As the team and I took a deep dive into improving this process we found that there was a lot of unnecessary steps and time wasters as we call it.

Here is the process above redefined:

1.       Compose and enter client email – we have canned (previously stored) messages so we don’t have to retype them. This takes 3 seconds. Just copy/paste into the email.

2.       Attach an estimate or proposal we had already created in QuickBooks, Excel or our company software. Sometimes employees have to look for the document in the computer, some are less savvy. Our average is 5 seconds.

3.       Send to the client electronically with a read receipt notification, this cuts us having to check with the client. Automatically notifies us that the email was seen. We literally just click the send button. I don’t even know if this takes a second but let’s give it 2 seconds so the calculation is simple.

Overall time invested in this new method: 5+8+2 = 15 seconds. Note: With repetition, like many things, we become faster and faster. Regularly this is accomplished in less than 10 seconds.

Using the same number of average faxes per day (30) at 10 seconds a piece, we now spend 20 minutes a month.

What would you rather choose?

20 Hours or 20 Minutes?

Modernizing without Complexity

Now you have seen the difference in using a better method. But is this method complex to setup? What if I run a small business with people that are not tech savvy? How will adoption work? These are often questions people ask when change is underway. Usually panic comes before they even understand what is coming. Here are a few points to help you migrate over. Remember, people always want the easiest route to complete their work. If you can improve their workflow, you can improve your business.

Efficiency

As you can see from above, faxing is slow. It’s really slow. It’s a huge waste of time. Kind of like how many sentences I just wrote to explain that. Unlike email, which today can be accessed from any smart device, with fax you need to physically wait next to your big ‘ol clunky facsimile box for a possibly illegible piece of paper to slowly crawl out. It could be a while too, especially if you are either sending or receiving more than two faxes at once.

All that waiting, getting up, walking to the machine, etc. is a big part of why faxing is so slow – with email, you can send the equivalent of 20 or more faxes in one message. Yes, you can attach more than one attachment and all in good quality within seconds. You can even leverage your smartphone to view/send. No need to wait, no need to be chained to your old fax machine, just freedom. Maximum efficiency. Your bottom line improved.

Maintenance and Accuracy

Even worse than waiting around for a fax to come through or to send out is finding out that it’s a big smudged blob of black ink that looks more like a 5-year-old’s latest art piece. Somewhere along the process the ink had issues or the sender didn’t have a good fax so that important invoice is gone.

Since faxing relies on the machine to print out faxed documents, there is a lot riding on that old machine’s performance. What if the machine is out of ink? Or, what if the fax could not be copied properly on the sending/receiving end? It’s likely that for any of these problems, you must call those on the sending end and hope round two goes better – another big waste of time.

With email, the information you send is always readable and requires no maintenance. It is also free if you choose to use a free email provider like Gmail. If you want a more professional inbox, plans start at $5 dollars per month. That is significantly less than the amount you spend on ink.

Security

Now, you might be thinking that a good old analog technology like faxing, which uses good old hard-copy paper files, might be more secure than a digital technology like email. It can be the opposite, consider this example:

Let’s say you work in an office where there are multiple people in and out. Perhaps you have two or more floors to travel and you need a fax that is coming to you right now. You just spent an hour on the phone with the client. When you get to the fax, it’s gone! Who could have taken it? Did it get scrambled with other papers someone else picked up? Did the fax not come through?

Unfortunately, since good old analog hard-copy technologies have no way to track messages, it’s likely you will never know where that fax ended up (if it ever even came through). So now you have to repeat the call again, waste more time and look bad asking the customer to resend it. Even worse what if someone picked it up that should not be seeing important details.

With email, it’s easy to track when messages came through and who received them – easy historical record. The information is kept between you and the sender.

Accessibility

Now this is something employees love. Easy access to information immediately from the convenience of their desk. Need I say more? As a business owner, you can also keep an eye out on everything even when you are on vacation by accessing email from your laptop, phone and or tablet.

Your Bottom Line Matters

So, should you get rid of faxing as your main method of sending/receiving documents? Absolutely. If this initiative didn’t convince you, let me translate it into terms we can all understand:

FAXING IS A WASTE OF MONEY

All the extra resources required to set up and keep a fax machine running, along with all the inefficiencies and all the wasted time are likely hurting your bottom line.  Nobody likes to lose money. Especially when setting up an email account nowadays takes less than 30 seconds. There is little to no learning curve and you can accomplish everything faster.

With less and less people using fax, where do you stand?