Forest City Streamlines Document Processing with RightFax and Xerox

The flow of information into and out of national real estate firm Forest City Enterprises is constant. In a typical day, a district manager will send multiple reports to 15 or more on-site facility managers at buildings that are owned or operated by the company. In addition, long documents of 30 pages or more are often distributed.

To increase productivity and decrease costs, Forest City Enterprises updated its document delivery process with help from two industry leaders.

COMPANY BACKGROUND
Forest City Enterprises, Inc., (www.fceinc.com) is a $5 billion real estate firm with diversified holdings in 21 states and the District of Columbia. Headquartered in Cleveland, the company develops, acquires, owns and manages commercial and residential real estate properties. Its portfolio includes nearly 200 retail, residential, office and hotel properties.

The Forest City Land Group owns and develops raw land and the Forest City Lumber Trading Group operates one of the largest lumber wholesaling businesses in North America. Seven regional offices are located in New York, Los Angeles, Boston, Tucson, Denver, Washington, D.C. and San Francisco. In all, Forest City has more than 1,000 employees.

THE CHALLENGE
District managers and other personnel in Forest City Enterprise’s regional offices are in constant contact with property managers. While on-site property mangers run the hotels, shopping centers or apartments that are owned or operated by Forest City, it is the district manager’s job to supervise, coach and otherwise help the property managers lease the spaces.

A typical day in the life of a district manager in Forest City’s Los Angeles regional office involves sending multiple reports to 15 or more building managers. To accomplish this in the past, the district manager would leave his or her desk, possibly wait for one of the office’s four standalone fax machines to become available, and then manually enter each fax number and wait for transmission confirmation. The entire process often took up to 20 minutes and was repeated several times during the day.

As a result, information was not efficiently flowing into and out of the company’s regional offices. District managers were spending too much time sending repetitive faxes and not enough time helping the property managers.

THE SOLUTION
To return some of this lost time to the district managers, Forest City’s Los Angeles regional office staff decided to upgrade its business process for handling important documents. It now relies on two industry leaders who were the first to bring their respective solutions to the market: Captaris RightFax for enterprise fax and e-document delivery solutions and Xerox for multi-function machines. Both companies, strategic partners for seven years, offer solutions aimed at simplifying business processes, reducing cost and increasing productivity.

“We started off wanting to give our people the ability to send faxes from their workstations,” said Jamie Halimi, Forest City’s Manager of IS Operations-West Coast in the firm’s Los Angeles office. “At the same time, we were in the midst of evaluating the Xerox Document Centre 460 and it made sense to integrate the capabilities of RightFax with the Document Centre and do everything at the same time.”

Now, having used RightFax and Document Centre for several years, Halimi said, “It’s worked out very well for us and our people are much more productive.”

Desktop Delivery
By using RightFax, Forest City Enterprise’s personnel can remain at their desks and automatically send fax reports to predefined lists of on-site property managers. Previously, it could take a district manager anywhere from 15 to 20 minutes to fax a report to the 15 or more property managers in his or her territory. With RightFax, they can perform the same task in a matter of seconds. They simply associate a fax group with a document and then send it from their PCs to the RightFax server.

Using RightFax, Forest City managers may set any number of groups and automatically distribute faxes to each person in each group. “We use Microsoft Word and Excel, and all our people have to do is send a spreadsheet or text document from their PCs to the fax server and it automatically goes out to one of the broadcast fax groups they’ve set up,” Halimi said.

The integration of the RightFax server with the Xerox Document Centre has also helped Forest City’s information flow when hard copies of large multi-page documents must be distributed. “When someone has a large document or a large number of documents to fax out, they just go to the Document Centre and feed the document through the high-speed scanner,” Halimi explained. “With our old standalone fax machines, they would then stand at a machine for 10 or 15 minutes while the document was scanned for faxing.” With RightFax integrated into the Document Centre, a long document may be scanned in less than a minute. “Our people aren’t wasting time monitoring the fax machines the way they once did,” Halimi said.

After the document is scanned through the Document Centre and the employee returns to his or her workstation, they can use their PC to check on the status of the fax transmission on the RightFax server. In other words, the employee doesn’t have to continually return to a standalone fax machine to make sure the entire document was transmitted. This also eliminates the problem of paper jams disrupting an unattended standalone fax machine or questions about whether an entire document was actually scanned by a standalone fax machine.
 
Forest City’s personnel also learned how to take advantage of the tight coupling between RightFax and Microsoft Outlook. “They really like being able to use the information stored in Outlook’s address book to send faxes,” Halimi said. “They just pull contact information like the person’s name, company name, fax number and phone number out of Outlook and this is used to automatically generate a fax cover page. They save a lot of time by generating their faxes this way.”

Also, the capabilities and benefits of using RighFax are a reliable component of Forest City’s business processes, Halimi said. “RightFax is very reliable and it has the capacity to grow with our business,” he said.

THE RESULTS
In the firm’s Los Angeles office, the integration of RightFax with Xerox Document Centre has improved the efficiency of the office’s information flow. Automatic broadcast fax groups through the RightFax server can save each district manager as much as an hour if several reports are distributed in a day. When a hard copy of a long document of 30 pages or more must be sent, a district manager can save more time by using the high-speed scanner of the Document Centre and then fax the document through RightFax.

FOR MORE INFORMATION
Captaris is a leading provider of business information delivery solutions that integrate, process and automate the flow of messages, data and documents. Captaris produces a suite of proven products and services, in partnership with leading enterprise technology companies, delivered through a global distribution network. Captaris has installed over 80,000 systems in 44 countries, with 93 of the Fortune 100 using the company's award-winning products and services to reduce costs and increase the performance of critical business information investments. For more information, please contact www.captaris.com or 1.520.320.7000.