FAXCOM Makes Dollars and Sense

hen their original fax server solution wasn’t able to keep pace with their growing requirements, a large Fortune 500 lending institution upgraded to FAXCOM and realized huge savings in both time and money. With new fax functionality their old system couldn’t provide and better customer support, FAXCOM provided a better-integrated fax solution that makes life easier for both users and administrators.

The Lending Institution
With offices in 48 states (plus Canada and Mexico), this Fortune 500 company is a household name when it comes to financial services. The Personal Loans Division employs over 21,000 people and provides lending services throughout North America. Their primary business process is receiving loan applications submitted by agents in satellite offices and sending responses back to these agents.

Faxing makes up the vast majority of these transactions. With over two million pages faxed every month, fax is a mission-critical part of the lending company’s business. Traditional fax machines are completely inadequate for this kind of volume, so the company required a fax solution that routed faxes directly to the appropriate recipient electronically. Loan officers need to be able to view the inbound faxes right on their desktops, approve or reject the loan application and fax back a response – all without generating a single sheet of paper.

The Problem
The company’s existing fax server solution wasn’t up to the job. Implemented over six years ago, the old system couldn’t expand to meet growing needs. Each fax server supported only a single fax card – a serious hardware management problem with 28 servers deployed! This lack of hardware flexibility meant that fax servers were often either overloaded or under-utilized depending on their location. System administrators were aware of the problem, but the only expansion option was to add another box instead of expanding the existing fax server’s capacity. This was less efficient and more complicated for administrators to manage piecemeal than an overall solution replacement.

Administration was also a problem as the legacy system used a clumsy command-line interface and had no automated reporting capabilities. If a fax server went down the system administrators had to quickly perform the difficult task of figuring out which fax server it was and what caused the crash. This often required a painstaking review of the server logs, which resulted in a significant waste of man-hours. Worse still, this could only be done by directly accessing the individual fax server’s local management application – another challenge as administrators were not always in the same physical location as the failed server. User management was time-consuming as LDAP integration was minimal. Even implementation was problematic, as the old system required the installation of three different applications in order to provide faxing functionality! The system administrators were aware of these problems and wanted a more efficient and effective solution.

Vendor support was also very poor with long waits for assistance. Despite the size of their implementation (and the hefty support annual support charges they paid), the lending institution found they had to spend thirty minutes of each support call explaining who they were and how their system worked. Requests for new functionality were ignored. There was also no support for Windows Server 2003, a serious problem since the company was at that time planning a migration.
The overall result was a fax server system that was difficult to keep up and running. Regular reboots were required and administrators spent far too much time on problem reports. Clearly the company needed a new system and a new vendor in order to support their growing fax requirements.

Biscom’s FAXCOM Fax Server Solution
The Operating Systems Engineer for the lending institution was tasked with finding a new solution and it didn’t take him long to settle on Biscom. After attending on online Web seminar and a follow-up, Web-based demonstration with a Biscom software developer, he was sold. “It came right down to exceptional sales, service and follow-up,” said the engineer. “We weren’t getting that kind of response from any of the other vendors.”

Practical considerations were a major factor in the decision as well. FAXCOM could be installed on the company’s existing fax server hardware, which resulted in significant cost savings. More importantly, FAXCOM’s wide range of configuration options ensured that those servers were better utilized. The company was originally using twenty-eight T1 lines for their fax traffic and many of those were under-utilized, but required due to network configurations. FAXCOM let them reduce that number to twenty-six T1 lines, all of which are carrying a more even traffic load.

The lending institution was able to go from twenty-eight fax servers down to fifteen because FAXCOM allowed them to provide more fax capacity where it was needed. Home office support went from eleven fax servers down to five for the same reasons. This means administrators can now redeploy those extra servers or use them for future growth. “We’ve seen significant savings not only in hardware, but in the expenses associated with housing and powering that hardware as well,” said the Operating Systems Engineer. “Now that we can route incoming faxes via PBX we’ve been able to reduce five trunk groups to only one.”

Reliability has been drastically improved with FAXCOM’s distributed fax server/fax queue architecture. Unlike the old system, FAXCOM maintains a separate fax queue that handles routing but doesn’t reside on the physical fax server. In the case of a server failure, the queue seamlessly routes fax traffic to another available server in the network without any losses. “When a fax server went down before, you were sunk,” said the engineer. “With distributed fax queues, now we only lose the server itself and the rest of the system is isolated.” This is also a key method by which the company is managing growth. “We have one fax server in Arizona that we aren’t even going to use for the moment since queue management makes it easy for nearby servers to handle the traffic for that site. As that site’s traffic grows, we can bring that server online when we need to,” said the Operating Systems Engineer.

Company Fax System (before)

Company Fax System (after)

FAXCOM has also made system management much easier. Administrators can now remotely manage their system from one central location. New fax routes can be created much more quickly and easily with no impact to the end users. “During Hurricane Katrina we had customers and branches that were just gone,” said the Operating Systems Engineer. “We needed to reroute those trunks and with FAXCOM we did it in just fifteen minutes. On the old system we would have had to manually reroute each trunk on each server, so there’s a huge savings in terms of time and effort.” Administrators can now remotely change fax server and fax queue configurations in order to immediately meet customer needs. The Operating Systems Engineer points out: “Before, our options were send it or print it - now we can shuffle fax traffic from coast to coast on the fly if we need to.”

User management has also been simplified through the use of Active Directory. This function lets FAXCOM use the network’s user list rather than maintaining a separate one of it’s own that requires management by administrators. “Active Directory has been a huge improvement and it’s something we were planning to migrate to anyway,” said the engineer. “The old system had limited LDAP integration so that wasn’t an option before.”

Implementing FAXCOM was simple, with installation, configuration and conversion taking less than an hour for each server. It was much easier for the Operating Systems Engineers to get other administrators to install the new servers as the fax server installation instructions went from a twelve-page document down to a two-page checklist. The company was able to migrate all twenty-eight servers in just ten months. The process for end users is even easier as the old system required three different applications while FAXCOM only requires one. “Users love it – they find it to be intuitive and well laid-out,” said one engineer.

Security is always a consideration when dealing with financial information, the Operating Systems Engineer points out, “We had internal auditors complaining about paper faxes being left in fax machines where anyone could see them. Now we can route that fax to a secure location and send a notification to the end user – much better security!”

Support is one of the most important factors administrators considered when making the switch to FAXCOM. Biscom’s support organization is available 24/7 and showed a much higher level of expertise and responsiveness than the company’s previous vendor.

“We can make a call and get answers immediately,” said the Operating Systems Engineer. “The support staff at Biscom understands our systems and how FAXCOM fits into them. At one point Biscom support walked us through redirecting an 800 number on the fly and none of our users even noticed when or how we did it!” Biscom’s regular software updates and new feature releases are also a contributing factor. New functionality has been developed and delivered based on initial requests from the lending institution.

Benefits
This large lending institution’s new fax solution has resulted in immediate and tangible benefits. First and foremost are cost savings. The Operating Systems Engineer estimates that the company will save over $320,000 in the short term just by reusing existing fax hardware. They have also saved thousands in monthly fixed telecom costs by reducing the number of fixed T1 lines and reducing five trunk groups to one. Recurring support costs have been literally cut in half, saving over $100,000 annually. FAXCOM’s advanced reporting functionality has also had a significant impact on the company’s bottom line. “Our engineers used to spend at least four hours each week creating fax usage reports for different business units,” said the Operating Systems Engineer. “FAXCOM’s Job Tracking and Reporting module not only lets us monitor fax volume in real time, it also lets those business units generate their own reports. They’re happier because they don’t have to wait for us to do it and we’re happier because we can focus on more important things. That alone has saved us over $10,000 per year in terms of time spent.”

The lending institution has also realized less quantifiable, but equally important benefits from the FAXCOM migration. Server management has been dramatically simplified. End users are finding the system much easier to use and are generating few support calls. FAXCOM’s Web interface makes it easy for users to fax from remote locations without installing a desktop client. Most importantly, the fax system has become much more reliable. “Fax is a mission-critical part of our business,” said the Operating Systems Engineer. “The stability and reliability of the FAXCOM solution is head and shoulders above our old system, and that alone makes the transition worthwhile.”

The company also has plenty of options for expansion. That’s an important consideration for a business faxing two million pages a day - and that number is only expected to grow. FAXCOM servers can easily scale from 2 to 96 fax ports, so the company will be able to use their existing hardware for quite some time. There are also plans to implement Biscom’s Advanced Fax Routing module, a feature that uses rules-based routing to facilitate document workflows. “Some of our business units are exited about exploring the options,” said the Operating Systems Engineer. “We now have the ability to extract information from a fax, immediately assign it to an individual and set up a workflow. In some cases we’ll be able to automate the whole process.”

Conclusion
Finance is all about the bottom line and the FAXCOM fax server solution made immediate financial sense to this large lending institution. Not only have they saved money by migrating to FAXCOM, they’ve also seen functionality improvements on both the administrative and end user levels. Most importantly, a system critical to their business has become more reliable and better supported. The Operating Systems Engineer sums up the improvements with one simple statement: “FAXCOM may not be a miracle, but it definitely is a blessing!”