Cloud Faxing for Transportation Companies

If you think about it, the transportation industry represents the original mobile technology.

So it’s ironic that even today, many transportation companies rely for much of their mission-critical communications on one of these least mobile technologies available — the fax machine.

But if your company is like most transportation and logistical organizations, the businesses you work with often leave your team little choice but to regularly send and receive many of the documents that are most important to your ongoing operations by fax. To name just a few:

–    Purchase orders
–    Bills of lading
–    Acknowledgements
–    Shipping documents
–    Invoices
–    Proofs of delivery
–    Confirmations

Although you might not have given it much thought before, paper-based faxing might be slowing down your business. In some cases, it might even be costing you business.

Here are only a few of the ways… and of course there are a lot more.

3 Ways Paper Faxing Might Slow Your Business

1. You need to stop on the road to fax bids for loads.

Let’s say you run a small trucking company, or you’re even an owner-operator and drive your own rig. You’ve probably had plenty of experience delivering a shipment and then, because you weren’t able to secure a load for the return trip, scanning the boards for a load you can pick up before heading home.

Often the businesses placing available loads on the load boards will require companies to submit their bids by fax. That means you will have to hunt for an office supply store that has a fax machine, print the document out, fax it and wait for a response. Or worse, you’ll have no alternative but to pull into a truck stop and pay one or two dollars per page to print and fax the bid.

2. Your office staff is missing opportunities because requests and rush orders come in over the fax machine — and no one is there to grab them.

The problem can also originate closer to home — in your office — and not only on the road. Here is a prime example; Your company receives some new business offers and requests by fax.

Unless you have your office staffed at all times, and your team knows to keep one eye on the fax machine , there’s a good likelihood that you will miss some opportunities for business from rushed clients. Often these clients simply give the business to the first transportation company to respond to their request.

3. Your company continues to invest in an expensive fax infrastructure that is largely under-used.

If you’re with a larger transportation company, paper faxing might pose a different problem — but one that’s equally troublesome.

Many larger transportation and logistics firms have committed to an ongoing investment of hardware, software, costly telecommunications services and in-house IT resources to keeping a company-wide, de-centralized fax infrastructure running.

This might consist of multiple desktop fax machines, multifunction printers and even fax servers at each of the company’s locations, along with expensive dedicated fax phone lines to operate all of this fax hardware.

If this sounds like your company, it’s worth stepping back to consider how much of an ongoing expense this fax infrastructure represents, versus how much actual usage your firm is getting from it. One of the many problems with maintaining your fax infrastructure in-house is that each additional cost is an all-or-nothing proposition.

If your company is pushing the capacity of a single fax server, you can’t simply pay for a little of a new one — you have to make full, several-thousand-dollar commitment to another server. And because you’re only beginning to push the limits of your existing server, this new one is likely to spend much of its time idle, and therefore isn’t likely to pay for itself for some time.

Similarly, if you open a small new satellite office, one that will house only a couple of employees who will likely need to send or receive faxes only once in a while, you can’t simply purchase some of a new fax machine or dedicated fax line — you will need to make the full investment, even though you know it will go largely unused.

The Other Downsides of Paper Faxing in the Transportation Industry

Of course, there are plenty of other ways your paper-based faxing process is undermining your business.

Maintaining, troubleshooting and upgrading all of this in-house hardware is costly. Also, the process of printing or scanning documents, standing by a fax machine while they transmit, or waiting in line at an office fax to send an important document — all of these tasks slow your employees and lower overall company productivity.

And of course there are regulatory implications to sending and receiving confidential business documents by fax machine.

Cloud Faxing: A Better Solution for Transportation Companies

There is a solution that can allow you to continue sending and receiving faxes for all of the documents your vendors and clients require — but without any of these hindrances to your company.

That solution is cloud faxing from the company that has logged the most miles in this industry — eFax Corporate

With our mobile friendly business fax solution, your company can receive, view, edit, sign and send faxes all by email. No printing. No waiting at the office fax machine for a delivery confirmation. And no delays in responding to a time-sensitive order because your team didn’t get to the fax quickly enough. Our fax solution will send you and your team faxes by email, and you’ll be able to fax back immediately, also by email, from anywhere.