Dunlop and RightFax
BACKGROUND
Dunlop Tire Corporation is a full-line tire supplier dedicated to the manufacturing and marketing of the world’s finest and
most technologically advanced passenger, performance, light truck, medium truck, and motorcycle tires. Dunlop has approximately
3,500 employees. Company headquarters is in Buffalo, New York; Dunlop also operates one manufacturing factory in Buffalo and
another in Huntsville, Alabama.
THE CHALLENGE
Several years ago, Dunlop Tire replaced its outdated purchasing system with Oracle’s ERP Purchasing application, running on
an Oracle database. The company also wanted to update its purchase order processes from a manual procedure of either mailing
or manually faxing POs to a more automated solution that would integrate with Oracle.
"Manually mailing or faxing purchase orders was very time consuming," says Steve Vannier, senior business analyst at Dunlop
Tire. "By the time they had printed the orders, stuffed them in envelopes, and put postage on the envelopes, our buyers would
spend a tenth of each day just mailing these POs."
Oracle didn’t offer a solution, says Vannier; neither did EDI. "We have over 10,000 vendors," says Vannier, " and only the
large vendors supported EDI. The smaller companies still needed hard copies." What was needed, Dunlop concluded, was a production
fax solution that would enable associates to fax directly from their Oracle ERP application. According to Vannier, most of
the solutions they looked at were expensive and somewhat inflexible.
THE SOLUTION
The production fax solution powered by RightFax technology from Captaris, offered a cost-effective product that would scale
to fit Dunlop’s needs.
By fax-enabling Dunlop’s Oracle ERP Purchasing application, Dunlop could more easily manage their mission-critical purchase
order process. Dunlop associates across the company’s three locations use production fax to send faxes from Oracle just as
easily as they print. The NT-based production fax solution has the ability to process more than 1,000 faxes each day.
Vannier considers their production fax system a sound investment. "It was priced at less than half the cost of competitors’
systems, yet it was powerful enough to grow with us. With just one server, we’re able to take care of the majority of our
fax needs."
Dunlop also purchased a module for faxing from workstations. This module provides easy-to-use outbound fax delivery and fax
management capabilities directly from Windows® applications at the desktop - putting all the benefits of a complete enterprise-wide
fax solution on a PC.
Being able to fax directly from their desktop has proved to be a time-saver for buyers, says Vannier. "It enables our buyers
to attach Microsoft® Office® documents to their faxes," he says. "As a result, buyers fax their POs directly from Oracle with
reference attachments sent from their desktop."
Dunlop customized several aspects of their purchase order process with production fax. First, they set up a filter from Captaris
so that vendor fax numbers were grabbed from each PO (rather than looking for that information on the fax server). This allowed
all vendor file maintenance to be done only in one place on Oracle.
In addition, they customized their fax environment to restrict this PO faxing capability to authorized users only. Dunlop
wanted to ensure that POs were sent and signed only by the appropriate buyers. To accomplish this, Dunlop worked with technical
support from Captaris to set up tables of buyers’ names on their production fax server that were cross-referenced to buyers’
signatures on the file server. When a PO is faxed, the program identifies who the user is and prints that name on the PO;
then, the filter checks the other table for the signature that corresponds with the name. If the name and signature match,
the fax is sent. If the name is not on the table, the fax is not sent. If the name is on the table but the name doesn’t have
a corresponding signature, then the fax is sent without a signature.
"This process has proven to be a very valuable security tool," says Vannier. "It’s an easy, automated way of ensuring that
our POs remain legally binding documents."
Dunlop has also set up their production fax server to make it easier for buyers to have a concise, printed daily report of
the faxes they send. "We assigned default printer ID’s to our buyers so they have a hard copy record of all the faxes they
send each day," says Vannier. "It’s an automatic process that happens every evening, and this gives the buyers an accurate,
automatic log printed just for them." This log is saved as proof that the PO was successfully delivered to the vendor.
THE RESULTS
Implementing their production fax solution has resulted in significant time and cost savings, reduction in the time and expense
needed to deliver mission-critical documents as well as a seamless integration with Oracle applications. According to Vannier.
"Now, our associates can spend more time on value-added, revenue-generating functions rather than on clerical work," he says.
"And, because the system is so dependable and scalable, it’s a solution that will continue to serve our purchase order needs
even as the company changes."
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