Myth or reality: Is the fax dead?

A recent Gallup/Pitney Bowes poll of Fortune 500 companies conducted in the US discovered that faxing is still the number one method for sending and receiving official international messages that must be signed for, at an average cost of $15 million per year. Whilst email is still the most common form of business communication, until the digital signature is deemed as a legal entity, many industries are still reliant on faxing.

GFI FAXmaker integrates with any email server and allows employees to send, receive, view, print, and save faxes from any PC or laptop without having to print a copy or visit the fax machine, which improves efficiency and productivity by allowing employees more time to carry out other business tasks.

Jay Bregman, Technology Director at a UK based courier company, eCourier, comments:

With the old single fax machine system, sales people spent at least 20 minutes per day preparing fax cover sheets, travelling to and from the fax machine, and punching in numbers. With GFI FAXmaker, less than five minutes per day is spent on admin, leaving 75% more selling time.

The financial impact of this is significant. If the person sending a fax is paid a modest $25,000 per annum, the cost of sending just one fax is $2. If that person sends 25 faxes per day, that equates to $250 every week, or more notably, $13,000 a year.

GFI FAXmaker also offers Fax Over IP (FOIP) functionality enabling employees to send faxes over the Internet whilst easily integrating with the existing IP infrastructure. Faxes are sent out directly from the user’s desktop. Integrated network faxing is a very secure method of communicating important or confidential documents. As faxes are received in the user’s account, they are not left out in public view and are not prone to being discarded.

David Vella, Product Manager at GFI, comments:

The most common pain point for businesses using fax machines is that they are so slow and outdated. The time it takes to send a fax manually is actually very costly for companies when you consider all the individual steps involved. By using GFI’s integrated network fax product, GFI FAXmaker, employees can streamline the faxing process by managing the entire chain of communication from their desktop, therefore avoiding time wasted on paper jams and lost faxes.