VSI-FAX Success Stories

We hear so many great success stories from the many delighted VSI-FAX users that we couldn't possibly include them all here. But here a few noteworthy stories from some of our prominent users.

• Santa Cruz Operations

• CompUSA Super Stores

• Home Depot

"People are not the measure for what VSI-FAX saves us; calls are," says Dale Burley, director of IS for The Santa Cruz Operation, developer of SCO UNIX.

"The biggest users of our automatic faxing system are not Telesales and Support departments. VSI-FAX gave them the capacity to handle up to 25% more calls. That means customers, prospects, and distributors receive a quicker response to their inquiries, and that's much more important to us than what we might save in clerical time.

SCO doesn't sell its operating systems products direct to end users, but its Telesales group does sell them upgrades, support contracts, and training, as well as work with SCO's many distributors. Incoming calls from either group may be for sales literature, price lists, or technical information, and enough calls come in for SCO to need 25 people full time to handle them.

The company's Support department is much larger. It requires 125 people on-line to help callers understand how to install and operate their software, reboot it in case of problems, hook up modems, etc.

Much of the time literature, price lists, and written instructions are faxes in response to the calls. In SCO's old system, the staff member would note the caller's needs, pull out the sheets, and fax them after their conversation was concluded.

With VSI-FAX, what sometimes took hours now takes minutes, and in fact can happen before the call is concluded. In the case of sales literature, the caller can confirm that what he received is what he needed, or can order from a faxed list of choices. In the case of receiving installation or operating instructions, the staff member can walk the caller through written instructions they both can see.

In some cases, it may be even easier, Users who have signed up for SCO's "info-FAX" support service can call in to an unmanned number and have information faxed to them automatically. Approximately 10% of the calls can be handled this way, without tying up a sales or support staff member. To make this work, SCO has tied VSI-FAX running in a 486-based UNIX server (running SCO UNIX, of course) to an Automatic Call Director, an especially effective integration.

VSI-FAX has also made "mass faxing: feasible. For example, SCO wished to offer a new service to more than 2,000 of its existing customers, and did so with relative ease using its Santa Cruz server and its eight modem lines. "We simply couldn't have done that before VSI-FAX," says Michael Thornburgh, the programmer who did SCO's fax integration.

"Automatic outgoing fax is now available to all of our departments and used in most of our business areas-- Purchasing, Accounts Payable, etc.-- here in Santa Cruz and worldwide," says Burley. "We have servers here, in Toronto, Singapore, and Watford, England, and at least a thousand known users across the net. All any of them have to do is enter 'fax' on their keyboard and the screen will prompt them to do the rest. None of them would ever want to go back to the old way".

Why VSI-FAX? "We chose it due to the fact that its commands were like UNIX, because it could be integrated into a UNIX environment easily, and because we knew we wouldn't have to retrain our users," Burley explained. "Ease of understanding is terrifically important, and VSI-FAX is easy for UNIX users."

CompUSA, with 74 computer stores located in 39 metropolitan areas across the country, claims that it saves in more than one way with VSI-FAX:

• On salespeople's time by letting them fax quotes to customer with just a few keystrokes, quickly and automatically.

• On labor, since dedicated employees are no longer required to perform the faxing manually.

• At corporate headquarters, to relieve an enormous burden on its AS/400 computers by offloading the faxing both to UNIX-based computers at headquarters and via WANs to RS6000 computers at each superstore.

"CompUSA uses VSI-FAX extensively in each superstore and at headquarters. We use it primarily for three kinds of transactions, with faxes running from one page to as many as 150: to fax purchase orders to suppliers for up-to-the minute inventory control, to fax quotes to potential customers, and to fax invoices and, when necessary, dunning notices from Accounts Receivable at headquarters," says Dan Pritchard, CompUSA's project supervisor.

Pritchard was in charge of integrating VSI-FAX with the RS6000s at each of the chain's superstores. He also helped set up the product's connections from the stores to corporate headquarters in Dallas over wide area networks.

"Implementing automatic faxing has enabled us to replenish our stores' inventories promptly. It is critical to our strong competitive stance in the marketplace that we maintain a full inventory. So you can see how urgent it is to get quick turnarounds on our orders," he says.

"In sales alone, we average between 200 and 300 quotes daily per store--and more during certain peak periods. At minimum, VSI-FAX saves each salesperson an hour a day in not having to prepare the faxes individually, walk them to the fax machine, and then have them faxed manually."

It also saves CompUSA a great deal on labor costs since employees need no longer be dedicated to operating the fax machines, as they were previously. "Automated faxing has allowed us to curtail headcount growth at the very time the company has grown so rapidly, " says Pritchard.

VSI-FAX is not the company's first faxing package. An AS/400-based fax system had been used earlier at the chain's headquarters, but that system taxed the cpu excessively.

Looking to ease the overhead burden in its large systems, CompUSA acquired VSI-FAX to run in headquarters' smaller UNIX-based computers as well as on each superstore's RS6000. CompUSA developed a system transfer via SNA from the AS/400s to the smaller machines.

The results were excellent for the company and for its salespersons, easing the burden on both the AS/400s and the employees.

Today at corporate headquarters fax volumes have grown to between 2,000 and 6,000 documents per day, which would have been a significant load on any AS/400.

"The return on investment was almost immediate," says Pritchard. "The package integrated easily with our quote system, and has been totally reliable, and the clarity of the faxes is much better than when we manually faxed them. This not only gives our faxes a much more professional appearance, but also avoids time-consuming call-backs for clarification and retransmission."It's a win-win situation.

Home Depot, with approximately 260 stores, saves considerably by automating the sending of faxes at each store. The large home improvement chain uses VSI-FAX to accomplish this.

Headquarters in Atlanta, Home Depot maintains an up-to-the minute stocking program by using faxes to provide its vendors with purchase orders. The store chain originally tried out VSI-FAX in a pilot program for special orders for kitchen and bathroom remodeling.

Approximately 20 stores were designated for this special order service. In testing and rolling out the automatic faxing capability for these special orders, Home Depot found it worked so well that they decided to incorporate VSI-FAX into the entire chain's purchase order system.

"Faxed communications are crucial to our stocking system," says Joan Burkett, Manager of Store Applications. "Products need to be in stock. For many of the products we carry, we can't abide even a 24 hour delay in shipment. That's why faxing orders to our suppliers is so important."

Each Home Depot store sends approximately 80 multi-page faxes a week to vendors. Done manually, these faxes could take anywhere from 2 to 4 hours a day, often requiring a dedicated employee. Not only did the store chain want a faster method of reaching its vendors, but it also wanted to free its operators for more productive work. Automating its faxes allowed the company to do both.

"An additional plus," adds Burkett, "is that scanning the P.O.'s for manually distributed faxes often produced illegible results at the other end, and required more employee time to verify and correct them. When we send them directly from the computer, the faxed copy received at the other end is clear and legible. It doesn't require a call-back for verification."

Each Home Depot store is equipped with an HP9000/827 running HP-UX. With VSI-FAX installed on each of these computers, the faxing of the company's purchase orders is fully automated. VSI-FAX creates a cover page to accompany the purchase order, obtains the vendor's fax number from a database, and automatically transmits the purchase orders to the vendors.

As a result of Home Depot's changeover from manual to automated faxing, the benefits it receives are:

• Increased sales and reduced inventory overhead through expediting and improving its restocking program by faster ordering.

• Reduced costs by being faster, more dependable and less expensive than the mail--and less expensive (with better, more legible copy) than manual faxing.

• Streamlined worker productivity with reduced or eliminated manual procedures.

We're very pleased with the benefits we've achieved through automated faxing at each Home Depot store," says Burkett.

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