Fax plays a pivotal role in digital transformation. This seemingly dated technology can make or break a bevy of IT trends, from cloud initiatives to remote work enablement.
We speak every single day with document-intensive businesses that are torn between a pressing need for digital transformation on the one hand, and a familiar but costly legacy fax environment on the other hand.
Below, we’ll highlight five key ways that RightFax brings secure, intuitive faxing into our age of digital, automated, cloud-first enterprise systems.
Increasingly, remote work isn’t an option so much as a necessity. Whatever the reasons—accommodating staff preferences, minimizing office expenses, expanding aggressively—traditional fax machines get in the way.
Missing important faxes on a WFH day isn’t acceptable, but implementing home fax machines and dedicated lines for remote staff isn’t realistic. Not to mention sales or on-site teams that seldom spend two days in the same place!
RightFax removes these basic physical constraints. Whether at home, in the coffee shop around the corner, in a remote office, or in the airport between site visits, it’s all the same: RightFax provides a fully secure way to stay on top of critical communication.
Physical documents are precarious. They’re susceptible to a myriad of disasters, namely office fires (which likely number in the thousands annually) and floods.
They’re also easy to misplace.
Whatever the cause, catastrophic data loss is the result. Mitigation is possible but costly, since it revolves around physical copies, transportation, and even third-party storage.
RightFax makes it cheap, simple, and essentially instantaneous to back up faxes. That includes not only the faxes themselves, but valuable metadata like transmission info, workflow states, and even extracted text.
Calamities happen in minutes. With RightFax, so does recovery.
We’ve referred to cost several times already, but exactly which costs does RightFax reduce, and by how much?
Many direct analog fax costs vanish immediately and permanently. Think fax machines and accompanying hardware, outdated fax telephony, dedicated floorspace, document storage rooms, and consumables such as paper and toner.
Most of these costs simply fall away. As for telephony costs, estimation is more complex, and beyond the scope of this article. That said, there’s tremendous economy of scale when fax is onboarded to existing enterprise telephony. And even when dedicated RightFax telephony is still necessary, it serves many users simultaneously, so the marginal cost of any one user falls to virtually nothing.
Indirect analog fax costs tend to diminish with time and adoption. Staff time is the largest: even small teams can lose hours per day to collating paperwork, chasing down missing documents, waiting for confirmations, and inevitably addressing errors.
And that’s not to mention the costs of burdensome disaster recovery or geographical constraints, as discussed above.
These indirect costs are harder to measure but may be the largest source of savings in the long run—all the more so as labor expenses remain on the rise.
The point of digital transformation, by definition, is to replace manual and/or analog processes with more streamlined digital alternatives.
Paper document workflows impose massive costs, inconveniences, and risks. The examples we’ve covered above are just some of the most salient ones.
Digital workflows create efficiency both within processes (e.g., time and effort to complete) and around processes (e.g., tracking and monitoring interconnected workflows).
The key is to digitize as far upstream as possible. Ideally, that’s the moment a fax arrives. Instead of printing, physically distributing, filing, and so forth, RightFax enables immediate and auditable digital distribution. From receiving documents to triggering complex workflows, all processes become as hands-off as stakeholders desire.
These days, compliance, security, and transparency are non-negotiable—and often carry huge risks in money and reputation alike.
The ability to track, audit, and report on every action is indispensable. As a centralized, enterprise-ready application, RightFax offers thorough logging, granular permissions, and comprehensive audit trails that are categorically impossible with paper-based systems.
Whether it’s for internal reviews, regulatory compliance, or simply to understand workflow patterns, RightFax provides invaluable depth and breadth of tracking.
Gone are the days of faxing as a clunky, costly, paper process. With the maturity of tools like RightFax, it’s ripe for digital transformation.
Granted, different industries are collectively at different stages of fax modernization. However, odds are at least one of your competitors is currently using RightFax to transform fax from a money sink to a competitive advantage.
If digital fax transformation isn’t already table stakes in your industry, then it’s only a matter of time until it will be.
To see how RightFax or a managed Private Fax Cloud® solution can move you forward, please reach out today.