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Using Technology to Improve Fax Delivery
The Company
Furniture4U is in the business of building better furniture. Founded
in 1994, the family-owned company manufactures and markets high
quality home office furniture, business office furniture and clocks in
Australia and internationally. Now the company employs over 27 full
time staff at its facilities in Sydney.
The Problem
Despite the popularity of its functional, well-crafted furniture and
clocks among its high-end dealers, Furniture4U's own manual faxing
procedures left little to be desired. Mark Batty, systems manager,
explains, "Manual faxing was a hassle. Instead of spending their time
negotiating and maintaining strong vendor relationships, our
purchasing agents wasted most of it sending faxes and verifying their
receipt. The time involved to do such a simple task was staggering.
If other people were waiting to use the fax machine, the process would
take that much longer. It was really inconvenient."
In the search for a better solution, Furniture4U came across the
services of TraiTel Telecommunications. "Someone from their customer
service personnel sent me the link to their fax
sending and
fax receiving
calculators to compute how much money we would save," remarks Mark.
"The results were very clear and I saw how quickly Furniture4U could
start saving money rapidly by taking on the service."
The TraiTel Solution
In March 2003, Furniture4U started using the TraiTel service for
receiving and sending faxes. "The TraiTel staff were always very
helpful in answering all of our questions. Unlike most companies they
had a fantastic proactive approach to our initial steps in learning to
use the service - mind you, it took us less than an hour to become
proficient on a system that is actually very easy to use."
"By now having our staff send all faxes via email, it takes less time
to determine what did or didn't go through and why - the clear
responses we get back to tell us if the fax was successful or not are
extremely quick and very convenient," adds Mark.
The company expects substantial benefits from using the TraiTel
service. "In the first year, we anticipate a saving of over $5000 in
administrative costs from automating and implementing purchase
orders, acknowledgments, invoices and statements," confirms Mark. On
a weekly basis, approximately 15 single-paged PO's are sent, while
acknowledgments make up for an average of 50 single-paged
transmissions.
Furniture4U employees are very pleased with the service. Mark notes,
"The TraiTel service is very easy to use, we receive all our faxes via
email and send in the same way. It takes about 5 minutes for us to
train new people on it, and our users are very happy because it
simplifies their jobs. They would just hate to have it taken away
from them."
"The TraiTel service has done everything we needed it to do. It's
saving us a lot of time and money."
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