Federated Cooperative Limited (FCL) is a cooperative retail conglomerate in Western Canada comprised of 300 retail co-operatives serving an estimated 900,000 members throughout Canada. FCL uses Biscom's FAXCOM solution to keep their enterprise communications running smoothly.

Retail co-operatives provide their members with a wide variety of products and services, everything from groceries and other general household merchandise to petroleum, crop supplies and feed for livestock. Member co-ops own FCL, creating a powerful and far-reaching wholesaling, manufacturing, and administrative organization. Through FCL, these co-ops share in the ownership of such diverse holdings as: food wholesalers, feed plants, propane distribution centers, a petroleum refinery and a sawmill and plywood facility.

Ray LeBlanc is FCLs Technical Specialist, ensuring that their IT infrastructure runs smoothly and grows to meet their needs. About a dozen years ago, FCL installed a proprietary email application on their mainframe system for internal communications. As part of this implementation, four PCs were used with ten phone lines for faxing. There were three very obvious and noteworthy problems with this system: message transfer to the faxing PC would often fail due to poor throughput, outbound faxes couldn't be prioritized, and the system just couldn't handle FCL's fax volume due to a capacity of 120 pages per hour. "There were days where there literally weren't enough hours in the day to get faxes out," stated LeBlanc.

When FCL looked to replace the system, they were impressed by Biscom's SMTP capabilities, since they had been using the messaging application for a number of years and were looking for an integrated solution. The company likes using the SMTP application since any application that can generate an email message can also generate a fax, thereby providing most of FCL's users (and document types) access to faxing.

"Biscom provided a turnkey solution and that was a major deal maker for us," said LeBlanc. "Plus, the ease-of-use of the system during a product demonstration. I was able to send myself some test faxes using the system right away."

"FAXCOM combines a very competitive price with a good feature set," continued LeBlanc. "Additionally, the engineering team integrated some product enhancements into our system per our specifications including the abilities to: prioritize the faxes in the queue, send outbound faxes in the queue going to the same number with one call, and limit the fax acknowledgments to send alerts on failures only, to cut down on email notifications."

Today FCL has over 150 users on the FAXCOM system, including the office services group, which was added due to the email to fax integration of FAXCOM for SMTP. Fax volume has increased from 45,000 to 80,000 pages per month on average, and faxing queue backlogs are a thing of the past. Moreover, with the implementation of FAXCOM, FCL's fax failure rate has dropped dramatically from 4% to a fraction of 1%. So now, on any given day, an average of only three faxes fail out of approximately 2,500.

Since 1986, Biscom has been widely recognized for its pioneering advances and market leadership in the technologies of enterprise fax management and secure document delivery. Biscom provides software-based and complete turnkey information technology systems to some of the world's leading companies. The company's FAXCOM Servers provide enterprise-wide solutions that are reliable, scalable and flexible.