Fax Migration Case Study

The Business Issue

Our client is a large financial institution that has hundreds of analogue fax machines which are used for communication both inbound and outbound to customers, suppliers and other branch offices. They all communicate over leased lines which are used for telephone, fax and IP traffic. A change to the bandwidth due to fax migration to IP or scan could cost the organisation millions if the line bandwidth needs to be upgraded.

These fax machines are suffering from a number of issues and the pressure to change is increasing

The faxes are all under a service contract which requires a significant budget
Service level agreements on the repair do not always allow for business continuity
Quality of transmission and receipt is quite variable
Sarbanes Oxley and the FSA require more stringent tracking than can easily be put in place
Repeat transmissions and follow up phone calls are now required to assure receipt
Security and document loss are daily risks
Filing of faxes and transmission logs is a manual task
Records and monitoring are non-existent
Faxes are gradually reducing in volume, hardware is not being withdrawn in parallel
New processes require transmission of images such as passport photos

Our Solution

Our project was set up to review the physical and tangible impact of analogue faxing within this client, we tracked all devices by a physical reconciliation and audit and captured the fax journals into an SQL database over an agreed period of time. The database was then used to determine the volumes and destinations of the faxes in order to map their routes.

The data collected was then modelled against a number of options to look at alternative solutions including electronic fax, email, workflow changes etc.

The distribution of faxes to and from central data centres used for processing were isolated and reviewed as part of the review.

The impact of legislation was also reviewed within the environments that were operated via some 1-1 interviews and this information was collated into a change management programme.

The preliminary data was then reviewed with the client along with a business case that considered the options. Further analysis was requested including a detailed review of the bandwidth implications of the telephone network of a change from analogue to IP based transmission. This was carried out by us using different transmission techniques in order to find the optimum methods and the cost model was then created to build the final business case.

The client was then able to determine with us the best options for moving forward with confidence that they had fully reviewed the implications of any change with a defined cost model.