It wasn't long ago that we were constantly shuffling paper. We had proposals, quotes, purchase orders, marketing brochures, and other documents that needed to be delivered. Whenever one of these had to be faxed out, people would use our stand-alone fax machines, manually sending documents. It eventually got to the point where documents were piling up at our fax machines, instead of getting into the right hands. They were either waiting for our people to pick them up to process (which meant someone would have to constantly check whether a fax had been received at any of the fax machines) or someone would have to check whether the faxes were being sent out in a timely manner. It wasn't difficult to realize that this was all very inefficient and time consuming, and there was a lot of room for error in the entire process.

Fax modems are not the answer
Initially, we decided that installing a fax modem in each employee's PC would solve the problem. For a while this helped by reducing the paper floating around the office, but it didn't make us more productive. We found that using multiple independent fax modems made it difficult to track which documents were sent to which customers or suppliers. Even standardizing on the same fax software didn't help. We still had no way to easily track and report on which faxes went to which customer and whether or not they were delivered on time. This wasted even more time when there were multiple people working with the same customer or supplier because then we had to look at each person's PC to see where the faxes went out.

In addition, we were still dealing with several user interfaces. By that, I mean that at times we would print a document and mail it, while for other documents we'd fax them, and for still other documents we'd just email them. This wasn't an effective solution.

We made it our goal to find a solution that would let us send and receive documents from one interface. That would mean tightly integrating our document delivery system with Lotus Notes and Domino and our CRM/SFA (Customer Relationship Management and Sales Force Automation) solution, ME4N (Maximizer Enterprise for Notes), which we, and many of our customers, use extensively. I'm going to share some of the issues and concerns we considered in making our choice. This will hopefully prove beneficial to you, should you decide to find a network faxing solution of your own.