With its recent growth, Fabcon, one of the first companies to create precast concrete hollow core wall panels for commercial construction use, found itself overwhelmed by all the paper documents and the processes required to move them between the manufacturing plants, sales offices, suppliers, and customers. Having multiple manufacturing plants and sales offices can be a communications challenge under the best of circumstances.

    But when you’re in an industry that relies heavily on sending and receiving sales contracts, purchase orders, work orders, bids, and other documents via fax, those challenges can be downright daunting. Knowing they needed to improve the efficiency of their faxed document management in order to continue providing the high levels of customer service for which the company was known, Fabcon executives began searching for alternatives.

    It was then that they discovered MyFax, an Internet fax service that allows users to send and receive faxes over the Internet through their e-mail accounts or a secure server. The company quickly discovered that the electronic delivery of faxes in PDF format was ideal for their enterprise-type setting. As an organization, Fabcon receives and sends thousands of faxes. Previously each incoming page had to be manually sorted and hand-delivered. If a page was lost or mangled the recipient would have to contact the sender and ask for it to be re-transmitted, all of which took time.

     “Often times in our business multiple people need to see the same fax,” said Scott Jenkins, Marketing Manager at Fabcon. “Sometimes those people are not in the same office. One may be in a sales office while the other is hundreds of miles away at a plant or headquarters. Prior to MyFax we’d have to send multiple faxes, which got progressively harder to read. It was also time-consuming. Now everyone gets a clean copy at the same time, right onto their PCs. That alone has made us a lot more efficient.”

    Having faxes delivered electronically to the recipient’s e-mail in-box (the result of the fax being transmitted to an assigned toll-free telephone number) eliminated the possibility of pages being lost or delays in delivery, greatly speeding fax processing. On the sending side, faxes that needed to be forwarded formerly had to be printed and then faxed while someone stood watching at a fax machine. Now, the company says, faxes can be forwarded as easily as e-mail, and stored in network folders specific to each job or customer.

     “It’s easy for paper to pile up on a desk, and for important documents to become buried under less significant ones,” Jenkins says. “When you have a dozen faxes on your desk it’s difficult to prioritize them. When they’re in your e-mail box, though, and you have the ability to preview them, you can run through the entire dozen quickly to determine what needs action now and what can wait until later.

     “Fabcon has made a concerted effort as a corporation to be environmentally responsible,” says Jenkins. “Our new VersaCore+Green, for example, contains 54 percent post-consumer recycled material. MyFax fits right in with our goals of reducing consumption of natural resources.”

    According to Jenkins, the MyFax users across the enterprise have quickly become accustomed to the efficiencies it’s brought. “If we ever tried to take it out and go back to fax machines there would be a huge rebellion,” he says. “That’s how much our users have come to depend on it.”