Faxing: A Timeless Necessity
In a society full of people who yearn to unveil ‘the next best thing’ and strive to become an innovator in efficiency standards, one might ask why fax numbers remain on our business cards.
From the outside looking in, fax technology appears to be an outdated and costly service (an issue that we will discuss below). The reality is that people and institutions fax because they have to. The process of sending and receiving faxes has left us with a required and sometimes legally binding method of communication that even the most advanced technology has yet to replace.
Let’s look at some industries that rely on faxing and the rationale behind this dependence:
Banking and Finance: We see in the banking and finance industry enormous amounts of information that require signatures. Banks require authorizations for loan applications, purchases, leasing, and more. In addition to requiring the secure transfer of documents, in many of these cases a witness party is involved for the authentication of the information. Faxing poses as one of the only secure electronic transmission methods.
The Healthcare Industry: Being one of the world’s largest markets, healthcare companies rely on the transfer of information. Whether this is patient records or medical device sales agreements, healthcare providers rely on faxing as a means for the secure transfer of these documents. Beyond these case to case needs, the HIPPA Act of 1996 mandates the communication of patient information to be done in a secure way.
Insurance Companies: Similar to the Healthcare industry, Insurance companies (including Health Insurance) handles all kinds of information that require the secure transfer of signatures and records. From police reports, applications, claim forms and medical records; insurance companies depend on the safe transmission of these documents from insurers, to doctors and back to customers. Again we see faxing as an indispensible and often times mandatory method in such situations.
Manufacturing: A variety of documents are used in the manufacturing industry (pack/picking slips, invoicing, purchase order forms, statements). For many of these documents, companies need ink signatures (not electronic). While electronic form technology has emerged such as Quadrant’s Formtastic, the secure sending of these forms requires faxing. It is critical to realize that all companies use different methods or have different requirements that maintain the necessity for fax networks.
The Solution to Traditional Fax
Companies that use traditional fax methods know the business consequences that result from manual faxing methods.
Costs-
- Paper and Ink for the infrastructure required to print and fax.
- TIME!!- Many companies report that the time that faxing takes their employees away from their desks impacts the efficiency and productivity of business
Thanks to the innovation at Quadrant Software, QuadraDocV is a fax server that eliminates and reduces these costs dramatically. QuadraDocV is a fax server that allows for the virtual routing of mission critical documents. It securely sends and receives all types of documents that have been discussed in this post and delivers them directly to the user’s computer.
One might ask: How does the delivery of these documents to my email platform result in a secure transmission of information?
The answer is simple: Since faxing uses telecommunications, it is much more difficult to intercept these transmissions. (Hence the reason faxing is considered so secure) Further, email leaks are much more prominent than telecommunication tapping. This being said, when using a fax server, the server answers the fax and converts it into an electronic document and sends it to the company’s mail server. In essence, once the fax is received by the fax server it handles the document within the infrastructure of the company, keeping it secure.
So when you think about the necessity of faxing, remember the options that Quadrant Software provides in order to improve the flow of business while maintaining secure document delivery.
