Sending Cloud Faxes with SAP

The Benefits of Hosted Faxing

Server-based solution, particularly for companies looking to build a strong, obsolescence-free framework to conduct, manage, and control SAP document delivery. As we’ve seen, Cloud-based solutions eliminate both the upfront capital costs associated with deploying, maintaining and upgrading premisebased fax servers, as well as the recurring costs of connecting them to traditional telecommunications services. In their place is a predictable, efficient and scalable cost-model that frees capital for deployment elsewhere in the IT organization.

Select benefits of Cloud faxing include:

• Eliminating up-front capital investment costs.
• Eliminating monthly recurring costs of expensive analog and/or digital telecommunication lines.
• Reducing document-distribution costs by up to 50% (including reductions in monthly recurring costs for communications, data storage, and energy consumption)
• Usage-based pricing for a technology that might see declining use over the next five years.
• Reducing costs of internal IT resources required to maintain, monitor and troubleshoot fax servers.
• Reallocate IT resources to core competencies.
• Reducing delivery times for invoices and other accounts-receivable documents from SAP for improved revenue collection and cash flow.
• Improved fax security through transmission encryption.
• Near-real-time fax processing and scalability eliminates need for queuing faxes until off-hours.
• Giving your company a higher level of redundancy as insurance against data loss. In short, hosted faxing can be a highly sensible solution for the long-term, enabling your company to realize enormous cost-of ownership savings, which include making your company greener, more efficient, transparent, and its systems more reliable.

eFax^® Connector 2.0:
Provides Flexibility, Scalability

eFax Corporate^® enables SAP-based organizations to extend fax capabilities to their line-of-business applications (ERP, CRM, legacy systems, etc.) over an IP network, without the need for separate fax servers, fax software, fax machines, or phone lines.

eFax Connector 2.0 for SAP (shown in Figure B) a true cloud-based solution that provides fax-toemail services directly in NetWeaver via a simple configuration change according to the BC-SMTP specifications. There is no software to install on the company’s network or IT systems — faxes are simply sent, as SMTP email attachments, directly from the application or system in which they were created.

In this scenario, SMTP message attachments from SAP travel across the public Internet directly to eFax for conversion and processing. Encryption is provided via the Transport Layer Security (TLS) protocol, so faxes remain secure from their point of origin to final destination. Delivery Status Notification (DSN) emails are sent from eFax back to the originating instance of SAP, where they are routed to the proper module and the user logs updated accordingly.

As an optional feature, eFax Developer offers barcode capabilities so you can use the captured data for routing purposes or relational data tracking. Barcodes on inbound faxes can be scanned and their value provided to you as part of the “wrapper” information. This valuable, low-cost feature is ideal for enterprises and other high-volume environments needing an automated way to efficiently gather accurate information about important documents.

Lower the Cost of SAP Ownership

Cloud-based faxing with eFax® Corporate lowers SAP operational costs, frees you to dedicate resources to mission-critical areas, and accelerates the distribution of critical information while improving tracking and notifications. Implementation is a simple configuration change and scalability is a snap, with virtually unlimited fax capacity, constrained only by your Internet access bandwidth.

Other advantages include 24/7 system support, a multi-redundant network for enhanced security and reliability, and continual technology upgrades.

Enterprise Fax Solutions for the Long Term

By leveraging IT systems already in place, and reducing or eliminating the costs of your preexisting fax system(s), eFax solutions provide an almost immediate return on your investment.

Standard integration scenarios enable SAP enterprises to fax high-volume purchase orders, rate sheets, delivery confirmations, invoices, contracts, and other critical documents with ease, directly from a SAP application or SAPconnect. These solutions are ideal for companies in a variety of industries — including finance, insurance, healthcare, manufacturing, shipping, government, retail, travel, legal and more— and they help comply with government privacy regulations such as HIPAA.

eFax Connector provides:

• Easier installation and administration compared with the previous RFC interface
• The use of eFax through a standard SMTP interface
• Direct faxing from SAPconnect
• Better data tracking
• Compatibility with IETF standards

Account administration is through an eFax Corporate® Account portal. Using this powerful, hierarchical administrative tool, SAP administrators have the ability to set up sub-administrators for regional or branch offices, or retain centralized control as needed. User faxing privileges can easily be added or removed through this portal on an as-needed basis.

Authorized users can view, track, and analyze current and past fax transmissions in real-time, 24/7. Data reports are provided in summary form or as graphs and charts and can be downloaded for importing into other systems.

Conclusion

Achieving true fax integration with your SAP applications requires a solution that combines the virtues of speed and agility with long-term cost control and stability.

SAP managers and CIOs have begun to recognise the power of outsourcing to meet these objectives, and cloud technology has introduced confidence and surer economic footing throughout the SAP universe. However, cost is not the only factor when migrating to a cloudbased fax solution; special care must also be taken to ensure that your provider has the requisite experience, expertise, scale, and dedication to serving customers as passionately as you would serve them yourself.

The unique solution discussed in this paper —the cloud-based eFax Connector 2.0 for SAP, — supports all of the processes and modules within SAP. eFax cloud-based solutions require no extra infrastructure to maintain and deploy, which increases your overall ROI by reducing the cost and management overhead of faxing across your SAP enterprise.