The Pervasiveness of Fax
Much of the emphasis of document management has focused on purely electronic documents, but fax technology spans both digital and physical paper realms. Fax documents are essential to a range of key business processes across industries – in critical functional areas such as purchasing, finance, human resources, legal and sales. As of 2008, Davidson Consulting, a market research firm, estimates there are still more than 130 million fax machines worldwide sending more than 80 billion faxes each year.
Consider the variety of instances and departments where faxes are a central communications medium. They are a vital presence in sales and legal departments. Many purchasing departments use fax as their exclusive method for issuing purchase orders. HR relies on faxes to receive résumés or send offer letters. And financial professionals often communicate with accounting firms and banks through faxing.
This huge installed base of fax machines is a dominant force that requires intelligent fax technology to play a central role in document management. If companies want to conduct business and remain in compliance, a fax document management strategy can be a non-negotiable requirement.
Compliance and the Challenges of Faxes
With their ubiquity, familiar paper format and simplicity, faxes remain a popular medium for information exchange. But they do present significant challenges for enterprises of virtually every size. Business process automation – streamlining, structuring and accelerating the flow of information and execution of tasks and processes – can bring faxing challenges into sharp focus. Amplifying the challenges, of course, is the significant issue of regulatory compliance.
Unfortunately, in many companies, fax machines are “out on the floor” – for traditional scanning and printing technologies – and this presents shortcomings that directly affect compliance.
Security. Given their usage patterns and costs, many companies deploy their fax machines as shared devices in public places. Unfortunately, that cuts directly against many regulatory frameworks, such as GLB or HIPAA, that mandate strict controls on the privacy of patient or customer information. It is important to restrict access to the sensitive data that typically pours in over the fax machine; for example, wage information, tax information, revenue forecasts, personnel matters, and much more. When that confidential information arrives by fax in a public location, it can be viewed and, therefore compromised, by “fax bystanders.” For this reason alone, traditional fax machines are not suited to many processes governed by compliance frameworks.
Process Control. Without a dedicated user or log-on, walk-up fax machines and fax procedures are inherently unstructured. Faxes can arrive and depart without careful logging or routing. Not surprisingly, many may get lost before they reach their intended recipient. Paper trays empty out. Ink and toner cartridges run out. Machines jam. Output quality can fluctuate. For processes that rely on documents, it can mean that sound business processes deviate from their defined steps through the shortcomings of standard fax appliances.
Auditability. Most compliance frameworks – particularly Sarbanes-Oxley – require outside parties to audit processes, documents and results, and make determinations about the controls that are in place. For example, Sarbanes-Oxley compliance requires virtually any document (in any media) be tracked if it is a record of a transaction, either in part or in whole, that affects the income statement. That could encompass virtually everything from sales quotes to purchase orders to invoices. Traditional faxing is an inherently unauditable process and thus does not provide the necessary recorded, transparent trail of document flows, routings, reviews and approvals.
Archiving. Retention requirements vary based on the governing legislation, but companies need the ability to efficiently store and quickly produce selected documents on-demand for auditing and legal discovery processes. Faxes are often the documents that fall through the cracks. Ultimately, many traditional appliance-based, publicly accessible fax transmissions and receipts evade the careful, compliance-driven controls. Companies are systematizing their processes to meet compliance requirements (and improve their efficiency and customer service as well) – and it is time for fax solutions to join and fully support those efforts.
Fax Server Solutions
As enterprises and IT professionals contemplate strategies to improve compliance while streamlining their business processes, many are giving fax servers careful scrutiny as a potential solution to these challenges. As the name suggests, a fax server supports centralized faxing services for network-connected nodes. A fax server enables users to add cover pages, specify transmission instructions, integrate contact information from address books, send faxes from enterprise applications, automatically e-mail incoming faxes to named recipients, and so forth.
The advantages of a fax server are numerous, of course, because a central server is managing the flow of faxed information in an electronic, not paper, format. That immediately enables IT departments to structure how that information is accepted, routed, audited and archived. The capabilities and benefits of this approach include:
Integration with Other IT Systems. Integrating fax communications with business systems speeds up processing, eliminates human errors and lowers operating costs associated with manual fax processes.
Capture and Store Electronically. Fax servers capture faxes as electronic images, such as a PDF or TIF file. The result: easier (and lower cost) storage, access and the ability to share securely.
Inbound Fax Routing. Regulatory compliance makes secure inbound-fax routing a cornerstone of any solution. By utilizing direct inward dialing, the fax server intercepts an inbound call, captures the fax and routes the electronic image to a specific recipient’s e-mail inbox. This causes the fax to be delivered directly to the intended recipient and eliminates the risk that sensitive documents will be intercepted by someone else at a fax machine. This privacy/security is a critical component of how fax servers improve regulatory compliance.
Document Management Integration. With their built-in check-in, check-out, storage and retrieval of electronic documents, document management systems complement fax servers to automate the process of archiving faxes as they are sent or received. This helps the enterprise conform to relevant rules for archiving and retention.
Searchable Indexes. Some fax servers incorporate or integrate with technology that enables them to index incoming fax documents to create a searchable PDF document for later retrieval. This capability can significantly mitigate legal discovery or auditing costs by eliminating the need for manual sifting through thousands or even millions of documents. Instead, users can search for a key search phrase and quickly retrieve a “results” set of relevant documents.
Workflow Integration. Fax server systems can integrate with business process management or workflow applications that extend automated processing of faxed documents. For example, a company could specify a process under which a faxed document must first be forwarded to a supervisor for review prior to transmission.
Security. Fax servers enable users to send faxes from their own computers, rather than printing them, walking over to a public fax machine, perhaps waiting in a queue of colleagues, possibly leaving sensitive information in plain view, and unintentionally exposing sensitive information, all in an effort to send a paper-based fax via a fax machine. It is a similar story for inbound faxes as well – electronic routing ensures only intended recipients receive the documents.
Improved Auditing. A fax server integrated with a comprehensive document management solution enables enterprises to create and store a complete, auditable log of their inbound and outbound transmissions, including length/pages, time and destination/source, as well as any indexed searchable content. This provides transparency of controls processes.
[Source: Cantata]
