Get it there fast
Courier and regular mail take days to reach their destination. And sending lengthy faxes can take hours. A better way? Digital delivery. Before turning to electronic delivery, C&S Wholesale grocers regularly stuffed and stamped payment envelopes to its 4,000 suppliers. But that was before installing Esker's Pulse software. Now C&S sends invoices out as faxes or e-mail attachments. "We get information to customers sooner," says Rick Ketcham, systems technical analyst. Of course the company still must determine whether customers prefer email or faxââ,¬"but it's better than paper cuts. The system, which starts at $17,500, also supports delivery to wireless devices.
C&S sends a lot of faxes, but not nearly the same volume as Hewitt Associates, a global management firm. It typically sends 50,000 faxes a month to its vendors and business contactsââ,¬"a job that even three full-time assistants couldn't complete. Three years ago, Hewitt invested $125,000 in Esker's Faxgate server software and hardware. Douglas Hanna, Hewitt's electronic output technologist, figures Faxgate paid for itself within two years. For example, Faxgate shaved four hours off the time spent sending about 1,000 faxes in a single evening.
For companies that create and distribute a lot of presentationsââ,¬"and who doesn't have a sales staff armed with Power Point handouts?ââ,¬"there's Mimeo.com's ExactPrint service. Not only does it save your traveling sales reps from lugging paper materials on the road, it outsources the dirty work of printing, binding, and mailing them to someone else.
To use the service, download the free software. It converts and sends your presentations to a Mimeo plant in Tennessee where they're printed, bound, and shipped to you. The cost for printing and delivering a 14-page full-color presentation is around $26.
Solbright, an advertising services company, uses Mimeo's ExactPrint for producing manuals. "We can make documents as perfect as we like," says Tamara Westen, Solbright's director of information. "And it's as easy as sending a job to your network printer."
Digital delivery is certainly convenient and cost effective, but it gives you less control over your content. What's to stop someone from printing a copy of your materials and passing them off as their own? Or making changes without your permission?
To safeguard digital delivery, a product like ContentGuard is a good place to start. It lets you distribute digital documents, then tracks who opens and modifies them, and prevents unauthorised access. IndyPublish, an e-publishing firm, uses ContentGuard to distribute and sell digital publications. "We make sure we'll get paid for every copy we sell," says Loc Vo, Indy Publish CEO. Average cost for a medium-size company: $50,000 to $75,000.
Another way to secure documents is with digital watermarking, which stamps a document as the genuine article or an authorized copy. The watermark is normally invisible to people working with the document, but special software detects that it's there and confirms the document's authenticity. For example, Digimarc's SecureDocuments lets you embed a watermark in almost any type of file. It's especially useful for documents containing proprietary images.
For companies that work with signed documents, there are other issues at stake. How can you ensure that signatures are valid? Silanis ApproveItDesktop is one e-signature system that solves this problem.
Signature Pharmaceuticals, which makes liquid medicines, uses Silanis ApproveItDesktop to sign documents for the FDA. "We need 80 to 100 signatures a day," says Dr. Ravi Chandran, president of Signature. Previously, many drug companies used a runner to fetch signatures, he explains. Now, with Silanis, Signature cuts its overhead costs by 15 percent and doubles its productivity. "Before this, we had 15 filing cabinets to store documents to the FDA," Chandran says. "Now there are none." The software costs Signature just $100 per user.
