The Challenge
Over time, financial organizations have built enterprise-class technology infrastructures, in some cases due to mergers and acquisitions. Multiple branch and office locations make supporting this environment a logistical challenge, and can also prove costly to maintain.
One large, global 100 Company in this situation needed a comprehensive solution for automating its fax, scan, and document distribution processes. They wanted to reduce costs, consolidate resources, and secure data to meet corporate and government regulatory obligations, which require all forms of communication and document transmissions by regulated employees to be secure, traceable, and readily accessible for auditing purposes.
These regulations meant the Company needed to significantly enhance its fax infrastructure, consisting of unsecured, outdated stand-alone fax machines (and multiple ISVs) that could not support document capture. Although the Company had already invested in thousands of multifunction peripherals (MFPs) for copying and scanning, it hadn’t leveraged these investments to incorporate faxing capabilities.
In addition, the Company’s stand-alone fax machines required tens of thousands of dedicated telco circuits, each costing up to $20 per month. Additional costs per machine included maintenance and supplies, such as toner and paper. For users sending multiple faxes, these machines were extremely labor-intensive because they could not batch documents together. The Company paid a per-page fee for all internal/external and inbound/outbound fax traffic — a particularly costly service, since 60 percent of its faxes were sent to internal destinations.
What’s more, without transparency and auditability, the standalone fax machines provided an unmanaged entry point for unauthorized users to send or receive sensitive documents, leaving the Company vulnerable to unnecessary risks — and severe penalties.
The Solution
When the Company sought to improve its disparate fax infrastructure, security, and communications, it worked closely with a managed print service (MPS) provider. Their MPS provider consulted AccuRoute, and subsequently implemented the document process automation platform to capture, process, distribute, and archive all of its documents.
The Process
With the consolidation of its fax infrastructure, the Company achieved a significant and measurable return on investment (ROI) by eliminating telco fax circuits (each costing $17-20 per month), reducing of maintenance and supplies items such as toner and paper, and reduce real estate and energy costs associated with office storage.
With the adoption of AccuRoute, the Company and its regulated users increased their productivity and benefitted from the following secure fax communication enhancements:
- User authentication and validation to provide regulated employee accountability and corporate transparency
- User ID through personalized Routing Sheets and user-defined distribution lists
- Automatic formatting to text-searchable electronic copy
- Delivery confirmation
- Formatting for transmission and conversion to text-searchable PDF
- Archiving
AccuRoute integrated with the Company’s fleet of network-connected MFPs, which were specifically chosen to work in conjunction with the platform and provided a streamlined user experience — including one-button scanning when sending a fax. These MFPs replaced the traditional fax machines, reducing redundancy and cost.
The Result
The Company implemented a comprehensive document capture solution and justified the acquisition cost solely through the savings accrued from consolidating its fax infrastructure and eliminating outdated telco circuits, while meeting compliant communication requirements.
This new approach increased user productivity by standardizing processes through a consistent, enterprise-wide system with a common user experience. Training and use was simple and universal across the entire organization. Fax communications were more secure, auditable, and accessible than before. AccuRoute also increased productivity for compliance and record keeping, making it possible to automatically retain all records, rather than putting the responsibility on the user and business unit.
GLOBAL 100 FINANCIAL FIRM
This large, global 100 ‘Company’ needed a comprehensive solution for automating its fax, scan, and document distribution processes for its 30,000 worldwide employees. The Company’s corporate and government regulations require all forms of communication and document transmissions to be secure, traceable, and readily accessible for auditing purposes.
- Reduced costs through fax network infrastructure and hardware consolidation
- Full compliance for fax communications to avoid potentially significant fines
- Extensibility to many document-routing workflows requiring multiple distributions, archiving, and security
- Greater productivity through highly available and distributed MFPs
- Lower costs associated with filing, maintaining, and accessing paper documents that are readily accessible in text-searchable formats
“Within a year, we saved millions of dollars through the reduction of fax lines, while addressing all of our corporate governance concerns. This has created a standard platform for all future document processing requirements.”