Lord & Taylor and RightFax

The Company

Lord & Taylor, with headquarters on Fifth Avenue in New York City, operates 63 department stores in 24 markets, including stores in New York City, Chicago, Boston, Washington, D.C., Detroit, Atlanta, Miami, and Dallas/Fort Worth. Lord & Taylor boasted sales of $1.7 billion in 1996 and its mother company, The May Department Stores Company, posted record sales of $11.6 billion that same year. Lord & Taylor’s sister companies include Hecht’s, Strawbridge’s, Foley’s, Filene’s, Famous-Barr, LS Ayres, Meier & Frank, Robinsons-May, and Kaufmann’s.

The Problem

Lord & Taylor is growing, and every new employee needs immediate access to all the technology that will help them keep Lord & Taylor’s competitive edge. And that technology must be able to expand and grow as Lord & Taylor evolves.

"Our first concern with every new employee is to give him or her PC-based faxing capabilities," says Dave Estrella, network manager at Lord & Taylor. "Here in our merchant organization [made up of the buyers for our store] each of our approximately 300 employees fax our vendors nearly 20 pages worth of purchase orders and sales reports daily - a total of 6,000 pages per day. These vendors - Calvin Klein, Liz Claiborne, Nautica, and more - want this important and confidential information to get to them quickly and without security concerns."

Lord & Taylor had used a fax server solution in the past. However, according to Estrella, "it had major limitations, the biggest of which was that it didn't support our new Windows 95 environment. We decided it was time to look for another solution - one that would expand with us and offer the reliability and security we required."

The Solution

After hearing recommendations from friends, reading industry product reviews, and receiving counsel from Lisa Clevenger at New Jersey-based reseller Software House International, Estrella decided on RightFax. "It seemed like everyone I talked to recommended RightFax," says Estrella. "When I approached Software House about the situation and told them I was favoring RightFax, they concurred that it was the best choice for my organization."

RightFax also benefits the company’s vendors. With RightFax, Lord & Taylor is assured that the confidential sales figures it sends over the wire remain secure. "Because RightFax lets us designate the fax ID of the recipient, we know that our faxes are reaching their specified destinations," says Estrella. "Our vendors appreciate this feature," says Estrella.

Lord & Taylor installed RightFax on a Windows NT server. "Installation was simple," says Estrella. "RightFax technical support helped us during the migration when we discovered that our existing fax database had a corrupt file. Even though the problem had nothing to do with RightFax, they walked us through the process so we could quickly complete the installation."

While installation was easy, actually using RightFax is even easier. While a few Lord & Taylor employees are still reluctant to give up their standalone fax machines, most employees are saving time and money by sending out documents from their desktops. Estrella says RightFax is so intuitive that he has delegated some fax-related administrative tasks to different departments in the company. Estrella changes administrative modes using FaxUtil and can grant group and alternate administrators access only to users within their groups while Estrella keeps full administrator access to all users.

Now each department sets up its own users, maintains its own user database, and trains new employees on using RightFax, leaving Estrella to "take care of bigger problems." In fact, one designated administrator in the Human Resources department quickly set up a cover page and a database just for his group. "He figured it out by himself," Estrella says. "He borrowed the manual for a few minutes, and by the time he returned it, he had learned how to link his Lotus spreadsheet with RightFax’s database." This capability is possible because RightFax supports open phonebook sharing on ODBC- and MAPI-compliant database sources for Windows clients.

Estrella describes the integration in simple terms. "First, you generate a Lotus spreadsheet containing the labels RightFax needs for phonebooks entries - ID, name, company, fax number, etc. Once the main spreadsheet is complete, then you can use RightFax’s FaxUtil option to import a phonebook from a specific file. After the selected spreadsheet is imported, you have the option to copy the phonebook to any user or group. In our HR department, we, of course, have an ‘HR Group.’ All of their phonebooks now reflect the spreadsheet that was generated, allowing just one person to centrally modify the phonebook entries as needed and having the same entries replicated throughout as many users as appropriate," he says. "All users can obtain these phonebook copies under their user ID database for RightFax without even clicking a button."

Estrella adds, "That’s either magic or just faxing with ease—you call it!"