Fax machines are the Folgers Crystals of business equipment.  Sure you can make a quick cup of coffee but it tastes like wet cardboard.  Lower quality and lower price generally deliver lesser results.  Most people would gladly choose a fresh ground Cup of Joe over freeze dried coffee crystals.  If given the choice to watch the Super Bowl on a 19” Sony Trinitron with rabbit ears vs. a 50” flat screen with HighDef satellite, I am confident you would choose the latter.

Yet in 2010 people still considered faxing to be a standard business communication device.  It reminds me of those old tape recording message machines everyone had in their homes, “wait for the beep”.  Does anyone still use a modem, what happen to baud rate?  Believe it or not there are still some old antiquated technologies like this in use today for various reasons.  The old adage “if it ain’t broke don’t fix it” definitely gets too much mileage, the fact is if it isn’t broken taking a baseball bat to it might be a good idea.  Complacency is the Sith Lord of Innovation.  Everyone from the Feds, to Big Banks, Insurance Companies and Automobile Manufacturers still rely on facsimile to conduct critical business communications in a 21st century business world.  The image quality is poor, document security is questionable, there is no audit trail, the transmission speed is slow and the act of faxing is time consuming.

Last week my local gymnasium, The Valley Athletic Club (TVAC) sends me a snail mail (US Postal) letter asking me to update my billing records with their Accounting department.  It was your standard 20th Century paper form, printed on pretty colored paper with nice little fill in the blanks for my name, credit card number, exp. date, etc.  The minute I saw it I knew what it would say, “Please complete the above information…blah, blah”  Then BAM there it was “Please fax it to 360.555.1111”.  At least they asked for my email on this form, maybe there considering joining the Internet revolution that happened a decade ago.  I have received these forms for the last 6 years about 4 times a year.  That’s 20 forms that I have filled out with the same information, albeit changes in the CC# or exp. date.

So there I was sitting productively at my desk and what do I have to do, get up and walk down the hall to the ‘copy’ room and fax this form.  Tic, Toc, Tic, Toc….my fingers wrapping on the edge of the fax machine waiting for that familiar ‘’eeeennnnhcrrrrrrwhhhhzhhheeee’, knowing now that my fax communications had ack’d and nack’d, I return to my desk with the paper form.  I pick up the phone and call the accounting department at TVAC to make sure someone has received my fax containing my personal information on it.  After confirming the receipt of my fax, I promptly shred the paper form.

Talk about Flintstones

the whole process took about 15 minutes of my time.  This is the best case scenario, if it required a re-transmission or I got a voicemail then that time could be as long as 30 minutes to an hour of total time.  That’s my time, what about the accounting department at TVAC, they now get to enter my updated information in their billing system and then probably file the paper form in a filing cabinet.  Wow, efficient….NOT!

So we have 20 forms over my membership tenure at 15 minutes a pop, if I get paid $35 an hour that’s $175 worth of my time.  I should get a month’s free membership next month.  The real killer is for TVAC after all I’m only one member.  They likely have to do this fax dance hundreds of times a month.

The example above is small, when you apply the same basic script to the Mortgage industry, Healthcare or the Federal Government, the lost productivity amounts to billions of dollars wasted every day.  Fax machines suck.

Desktop scanners capable of capturing, connecting and sharing information digitally have been around for a decade, yet day after day faxing, always faxing.  Smart internet forms can eliminate the need for the paper form all together.  I have a hundred examples I could share of the complacency and waste that plague business today.

They all have the same common theme “Well, we have always done it this way”.