Parker Hannifin and RightFax

The Challenge

With annual sales approaching $5 billion, Parker Hannifin Corporation is the world's leading diversified manufacturer of motion and control technologies, providing systematic, precision-engineered solutions for a wide variety of commercial, industrial, and aerospace markets. Parker has 1,400 product lines for hydraulic, pneumatic, and electromechanical applications in some 1,000 industrial and aerospace markets. Headquartered in Cleveland, Ohio, nearly 40,000 Parker employees operate 190 manufacturing plants and 147 administrative and sales offices, company stores, and warehouses around the world. The company has more than 7,500 distributors serving more than 400,000 customers worldwide.

As the number of sent and received faxes at Parker escalated, so did the company's resolve to replace its cumbersome and time-consuming manual process with an automated document delivery solution. Employees at Parker locations around the world were manually printing out purchase orders, invoices, and quotes and faxing them through traditional stand-alone fax machines. Field sales personnel faxed hard copies of lengthy Microsoft® Excel and Word documents to their accounts worldwide while scattered Parker facilities began using various LAN-based fax solutions to help their own office personnel communicate more easily with distributors and customers.

When Parker decided to standardize its entire user base on Lotus Notes®, the company recognized an opportunity to develop an enterprise messaging infrastructure that would include mainframe and LAN-based document delivery capabilities. "We wanted just one solution — one vendor," says Don Shisila, computer operations manager at Parker. "We determined that if we could replace the various existing methods of delivering documents with one product, we would have the corporate-wide business communications solution we needed to save the organization both time and money."

Along with scalability and reliability, Parker wanted a document delivery solution that supported the company's current mainframe-based applications. "We wanted a solution that worked with our batch processing and CICS-based purchase order and quotation applications as well as with our On Demand for OS/390 archival retrieval system. The solution also had to integrate with the systems driving our IBM and Hewlett Packard printers, which were based, respectively, on AFP and VPS/PCL [an AFP-to-PC conversion program from Levi, Ray, & Shoup, Inc.]. Because AFP provides the foundation for the company's hundreds of forms, we wanted to avoid having to re-create or re-design these forms for a new solution."

Parker also wanted a solution that would put fax capabilities on the desktop of every Parker employee worldwide and support mainframe-to-Internet e-mailing.

The Solution

According to Shisila, only one product met Parker's criteria; RightFax production fax powered by CommercePath technology. With CommercePath technology, Parker Hannifin Corporation has a high-volume, automated document delivery solution that integrates seamlessly with batch processing and CICS as well as AFP, and supports mainframe delivery to e-mail, via the Internet, as well as faxing from Lotus Notes.

"Several companies told us they had AFP capabilities, but they typically required you to scan in a blank form and then try to match up the data," says Shisila. "If you changed the form, you had to go back and start over again. But when you've already completed all the setup once through AFP, why go back and reinvent the wheel?"

Now, Parker associates throughout the world can fax and e-mail from both the mainframe and Lotus Notes. "RightFax
(CommercePath) technology gives each of our users the ability to deliver information safely, reliably, and quickly," says Shisila. "As a result, documents remain in the hands of their intended recipients and are delivered instantly without requiring a great deal of effort from the sender.

"Speed of delivery is critical in dealing with our customers, distributors, and other business partners," says Shisila. "When a customer needs a part, for example, they typically need it immediately. Consequently, they also need the related documentation for the part, including a quote. With production fax, we're able to actually have the printed material in their hands within minutes of their request by phone — often while they're still on the line."

With a little more than 1,000 documents sent each day and growing steadily, the benefits of using a faster and more constant method for business-to-business communication multiplies. For example, the more quickly orders and invoices are delivered, the shorter the lead times are for purchasing, which can have a positive impact on inventory level requirements. In addition, immediate fax delivery also provides immediate confirmation of receipt, thereby eliminating delays associated with alternative methods of document delivery.

"CommercePath technology fits perfectly into our enterprise messaging solution," Shisila concludes. "It continues to save us time and effort by providing nearly effortless document delivery capabilities that accelerate and enhance our ability to do business around the world."