A comment on the whole idea of “paperless”: As much as I would personally like to see every company be more environmentally friendly, that is and should not really be the primary driver. Paperless for the sake of paperless has proven over and over to not be a way to make lasting change. Instead, it’s better to focus on what other material benefits can be gained in a particular business process (reduction in manual work, increased accuracy, better security, etc.), where reduction or even elimination of paper is a desirable side-effect.

A comment on fax machines: There is no doubt that the traditional analog fax machine is obsolete in today’s digital world. But the utility it provides of being able to easily send a paper original to someone else in a single step remains a useful and valuable function. At FaxLogic, we have no particular vested interest in whether our customers use a fax machine or not (we are in the document management business, and businesses will always have and need to manage and share documents, whether they are faxes, paper, or digital). In fact, many of our customers use scanners to handle their paper documents. But, for a great many businesses, analog fax machines are not only an intrinsic part of existing workflows, but also represent a substantial investment in equipment and training. To that end, we created a small “adapter” (the Internet Fax Adapter) lets you connect any traditional fax machine to the Internet (via your local area network), turning it into a smart scanner. We thereby allow our customers to use any combination of fax machines, scanners, and multi-function printers, along with email and web-based digital documents. And as their needs change, they may move from fax machines to scanners or multi-function machines, but we don’t force that move, instead letting them take it at their own pace.

By the way, a typical scenario for us is that a customer will keep and continue to use most or all of their existing fax machines (made into “digital scanners” by our adapter, and also reducing telecom costs by eliminating the associated phone lines), mostly using them for scanning/sending of paper originals; while incoming faxes are delivered directly into their FaxLogic account and/or via email. That represents a quick start to paper-use reduction, without requiring new investment in equipment, immediate changes to workflows, or retraining of staff.

Thank You