Published: September 09, 2008
The Fax About Cutting Corporate Fat
Newswise - Citigroup Inc., America's largest U.S. bank, recently instituted a number of corporate policies to ensure their spending is made "highly efficient." These measures include banning off-site meetings, eliminating color photocopying, and scaling back training to that which is "strictly necessary." Similarly, Deutsche Bank AG now requires dealmakers to secure managers' approval in advance for taxi trips and mandates that business meals not exceed 50 pounds (approx. $92) per person. While these efforts to reduce expenses might seem draconian, there are other, less painful but perhaps less obvious, ways in which big businesses can bolster their bottom lines.
"While those all may be sound corporate governance measures, there are other policies businesses can implement that won't sting so much," says Thomas J. Stallings, CEO of EasyLink Services International Corporation, which has been providing technology services for e-commerce business-to-business and internal enterprise communication since 1991.
The company provides desktop and production electronic Internet faxing and electronic data interchange (EDI) for companies to maintain automated, electronic paper trails for shipping orders, invoices, POs, audits, archival records, and other confirmations. Mr. Stallings offers six excellent reasons businesses should consider the benefits of desktop over hard-paper faxing when looking for painless ways to meet their goals for more efficient and cost effective corporate practices:
• Paper: An integral business practice, faxing also contributes to two of the most damaging environmental issues facing the world today: carbon emissions and paper usage. Those pages add up. The environmental awareness agency Go Green Initiative estimates that for every ton of paper that is recycled, the following is saved: seven thousand gallons of water, 380 gallons of oil, and enough electricity to power an average home for six months.
• Lost productivity time: You have to fax a twelve-page contract. You leave your desk to go down the hall to the fax machine. You get a cup of coffee. A fax is already coming through when you reach the machine so you decide to wait. Then the recipient's fax number is busy. You wait some more. Then you hover over the machine as it slowly feeds the pages through, one at a time. . .
• Dedicated phone line: every dedicated fax line ends up costing businesses major dollars each year.
• International phone numbers: By outsourcing faxing to companies that use remote data centers, businesses can save money, too, since faxes can be delivered internationally using local provider numbers.
• Office real estate: The fax machine, toner cartridges, reams of paper, and recycling bin all take up valuable office space, and big corporations might have multiple faxes on multiple floors. If you're paying X dollars per square cubic foot of rental space, that fax machine real estate quickly adds up.
• Blast faxing: Why are you paying others to receive unwanted take out menus and car insurance flyers each day?
"Apart from being environmentally sound, desktop messaging saves companies a lot of money," says Mr. Stallings. "As more and more businesses look to ways to reduce spending and maximize necessary expenditures, automated desktop messaging is a simple, safe, and relatively painless way to improve business efficiencies."
Source: EasyLink Services International Corporation
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