GFI Case Study: Building Services And GFI FAXmaker

Written by: GFI Software

Challenges
Wisenbaker Building Services started out as an emerging carpet installation company nearly 40 years ago to become of the largest builder services companies in the United States. They service the dynamic new construction sector with a full complement of products and programs in addition to providing support to the building industry. Over the years, Wisenbaker has developed direct relationships with building product suppliers from around the world. With overseas offices in China and Brazil, their primary goal is to bring strategically sourced and precisely developed products to the US residential market for installation in today's new homes.

With materials sourced from around the world, the traditional fax machine has been an important and essential tool for the company. Thousands of faxes are sent and received daily from around the globe requiring considerable investment in the telecommunications infrastructure, hardware requirements and resources such as toner and paper.

Apart from the obvious costs of manual faxing, in a company with over 500 employees, faxes can be misplaced or lost, apart from issues of confidentiality.

"Our main concern was the rising costs associated with faxing. The number of analog fax lines was increasing because of the volume of business coming in, however, the cost to maintain those lines was getting out of hand," Rick Crouse, MIS director, explained.

"This was the primary reason why we started looking for a cheaper solution that allowed us to maintain our dependence on faxing but doing away with the costs to maintain such a service. Overall, we sought to reduce our costs as much as possible and to make the process more efficient and easier for our staff to send and receive faxes," Mr. Crouse added.

Implementation
The main motivator behind Wisenbaker's decision to choose GFI FAXmaker was without doubt the price but quality and performance were also key factors. GFI FAXmaker is a fax server that allows users to do away with manual fax machines and use their email client to send and receive faxes. This makes the whole faxing process simpler and more efficient... and cheaper.

"Our main motivator was any electronic solution that was within our budget. We considered Captaris RightFax but did not implement it as our chosen solution because of cost. GFI FAXmaker was the most cost-effective solution to implement," Mr. Crouse added.

From a technology perspective, the installation of GFI FAXmaker did not force the company to purchase new hardware or servers.

"We were able to utilize an older server that would otherwise have been retired as the GFI fax server. The age of the box has not been a problem for the Brooktrout board or for the GFI software. We did not have to purchase a new server to implement the GFI solution," he said.

The integration of the GFI FAXmaker solution into Wisenbaker's environment was also smooth and there has been little impact on network performance.

Benefits
The benefits of using GFI FAXmaker were evident from day one, Mr. Crouse said, with the company immediately retiring 39 analog fax lines and 39 fax machines.

"From a financial perspective, the savings have been considerable. As I said earlier, we were able to leverage existing technology and not incur the costs of a new server to implement the solution. Additionally, and this is the reason for implementing GFI FAXmaker in the first place, we were able to immediately reduce our telecommunications overheads by more than $1,600 a month. We have also noted reduced toner and paper costs associated with printing all inbound and outbound faxes. Within 60 days, we had terminated the analog fax lines. Savings were also made in terms of central administration and management by the IT department," Mr. Crouse added.

"From a technology perspective, management of faxes is now centralized around the familiar interface of Outlook," he said.

As with every element of change, the employees required a few days to get used to the new system but they were quick to realize that electronic faxing was a marked improvement.

"The employees were initially confused by the act of scanning and attaching a scan to an ‘email’ as a fax, but after two weeks or so everyone got used to it and now cannot imagine not using an electronic fax solution," he said.

Target reached
Concluding, Mr. Crouse said that the company's targets had been met.

"Overall the product has worked as advertised and has provided a cost effective solution to our needs. The GFI FAXmaker product has met our requirements effectively."

For more information about GFI FAXmaker visit: www.gfi.com/faxmaker/.