Besides the fact that integrating cloud fax just became a lot easier…

In a previous blog post and webinar, we explored several reasons to integrate cloud faxing with your business’s multifunction printers (MFPs). One of the primary benefits we discussed was the ability to boost the ROI of the MFPs your business has already invested in, by allowing your staff to fax directly from the glass — but through the cloud, using the eFax Corporate fax by email service, rather than using legacy analog fax lines.

This post will discuss another way that your business can integrate cloud faxing into your employees’ everyday workflows — specifically your SAP applications — and the many benefits your IT team and your entire company will realize from such an integration. In fact, the ability to integrate an enterprise-caliber cloud fax solution, such as the one available from world leader eFax Corporate, might be reason enough for your company to consider migrating fax to the cloud in the first place.

Before discussing the specific benefits of a cloud fax integration into your SAP platform, here is a brief overview of how this type of integration would work.

How it Works: eFax Native SMTP Integration for SAP

With our business fax by email services, your company can enjoy faxing directly within your SAP environment — using any of SAP’s processes and modules — without any additional hardware or software.

Here’s how it works: When the eFax Corporate fax-connector solution is deployed in your SAP environment, SAP natively outputs your faxes as SMTP messages, which travel across the Internet directly to eFax, where we convert and process them to be delivered to your fax recipients. We provide the most sophisticated encryption, Transport Layer Security (TLS), to ensure your faxes remain secure from point of origin to delivery. When the fax is delivered successfully, eFax sends a Delivery Status Notification (DSN) email back to the originating instance of SAP, where it can be routed to the proper module for your team to log the transmission for record-keeping and audit purposes.

As a customer, your organization will maintain complete administrative control over all cloud faxes sent or received through your eFax account via SAP. This also helps control fax security because you will have control over all fax usage and can assign (and remove) faxing privileges on an as-needed basis.

Now let’s look at some of the ways your organization would benefit from integrating cloud fax with your SAP applications.
 

5 Benefits of Integrating Cloud Fax into Your SAP Environment

1.  Enhance the security of your faxes
As SAP’s first certified fax-connector partner in North America, compatible with its latest BC-SMTP specifications, our eFax Native SMTP Integration for SAP is a highly secure, highly reliable service for transmitting faxes by email through your existing SAP software platform.

As outlined above, moving your faxing to a cloud service from eFax Corporate can greatly increase the security of your faxes, both while in transmission over the Internet and afterward, while that fax data is at rest, in online storage. That is because eFax Corporate employs the most advanced security protocols for faxes in transit, including TLS encryption, and for your faxes in storage at our state-of-the-art tier-3 and tier-4 data centers.

We even provide redundancy for your stored data, storing it at multiple, geographically dispersed colocations, to ensure your archived faxes are always accessible even in the event of a natural disaster, outage or other problem at one of our many data center facilities.

2.  Improve your regulatory compliance
eFax Corporate’s highly secure protocols for sending, receiving and storing sensitive faxes have been demonstrated to meet the standards of even the strictest data privacy regulations, such as HIPAA, GLBA and SOX.

By outsourcing your faxing process to us, you can bring your organization’s faxes into alignment with these and other regulations governing your industry.

Indeed, our ability to bring businesses into regulatory compliance is one of the main reasons our service is the choice for many of the largest healthcare organizations, law firms, financial services companies and enterprises in other heavily regulated industries.

3.  Optimize and streamline your employees’ workflows
If your employees use fax regularly to send and receive key business documents — purchase orders, contracts, invoices, etc. — you can save them substantial time by removing the added steps required in a legacy fax environment: standing by an office fax machine for an anticipated incoming fax; or printing documents to be sent, taking the documents to an office fax machine or sending them to the in-house fax server, and waiting for the fax to be delivered.

With a cloud fax solution integrated into the SAP application they already use to generate purchase orders, bills of lading or other standard documents, you can empower your staff to simply click a “fax document” button to handle the entire process within their SAP environment. This includes auto-populating the fax recipient’s information, generating a customizable cover page, delivering the fax through the cloud, and even sending back a Delivery Status Notification (DSN) by email when the fax successfully reaches its recipient.

If your business does a high volume of faxing, this SAP integration can significantly streamline your business workflow, boost staff productivity and save your company money.

4.  Boost the ROI of your SAP applications
Another benefit of integrating a secure cloud fax service into your SAP environment is that it’s a great way to increase the ROI your business receives from your investment in those SAP tools.

Adding such a valuable, business-critical service as integrated cloud faxing can make your SAP platform substantially more valuable to your business over time.

5.  Save money and headaches by eliminating your legacy fax infrastructure
Finally, when you migrate your fax infrastructure to the cloud with eFax Corporate — and then embed our high-volume fax capability into your SAP applications — you will be able to stop paying to maintain onsite fax hardware, software and analog fax lines.

You will also be able to outsource all of the hassles inherent in maintaining that aging fax infrastructure, like troubleshooting problems with fax machines, maintaining the fax server hardware which can cause failures and rebooting crashed fax servers when they go down.

Additionally, with eFax Corporate you will enjoy more simplified, centralized fax management — including better data tracking, complete audit trails, the ability to create unique client billing codes, and more — even from those faxes sent and received through your SAP environment.

Integrating cloud faxing into your SAP environment offers tremendous benefits to your business in terms of productivity, cost savings and reduced IT hassles. But you need to choose the right cloud fax provider to help you make the move. As the first SAP-certified fax connector in North America, we have for years been helping businesses like yours streamline their fax processes and get more from their SAP tools. With our cloud-based eFax Native SMTP Integration for SAP, we can do the same for you.

To learn more about the eFax Corporate SAP Fax APP & Connector please watch our latest webinar here or visit the SAP Fax Application page.