XMediusFAX^TM Enterprise edition delivers “the fax goods” at Labatt Food Service

The Client

Labatt Food Service is a privately owned company that distributes food and related products to food-away-from-home establishments in Texas, Oklahoma, and New Mexico from four distribution centers located in San Antonio, Dallas, Lubbock, and Houston. From their seven sales offices, Labatt Food Service continues to grow its customer base of over 5000 customers, which include, restaurants, hotels, schools, military bases, hospitals, and independent operators. The company is widely recognized in the distribution business as an innovative, customer focused, high-energy industry leader.

Over 20% of the company’s 1250 employees use fax services. On a daily basis, the company receives approximately 200 faxes and on average transmits 150 faxes which can peak to 600 faxes due to internal departmental processes that run on specific days.

The type of documents being sent and received by employees include purchase orders, accounting memos and invoice copies. Each of these transactions is considered to be vital in their day-to-day activities.

Prior to the adoption of Sagem-Interstar’s XMediusFAX fax server solution, Labatt Food Service’s faxing infrastructure consisted of 16 analog lines running off a VG224 controller on Cisco’s Call Manager 4.2 connected to a RocketModem in an IBM server. The company used GFI FaxMaker to send and receive faxes, where each port was reserved for specific use to either send, receive, or send/receive. Every department was setup with one line (few roll-over lines) which limited its functionality, often causing busy signals.

The Challenge

Labatt Food Service was experiencing the standard “fax problems” associated to inefficient hardware based legacy technologies. Among the problems being encountered included the following: analog lines locking up, handshaking failures with particular devices, and looped behavior causing fax blasts to a particular destination due to incorrect SMTP configurations.

Faxing is built into Labatt Food Service’s purchase order and accounting systems, as well as being integrated into their automated processes. Fax usage is as pervasive as e-mail and thus required seamless functionality.

The company needed a new and dependable centralized fax server solution that would provide easy management and deliver a lower Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) while resolving all of their fax problems.

Among the prerequisites for implementing a new fax system included the following:

• A software only solution based on the standardized T.38 FoIP protocol
• Support for H.323 and MGCP protocols
• Active Directory integration
• Virtual Machine support using VMware

The Selection Process

Labatt Food Service did investigate solutions from competitive products (i.e., GFI Fax Maker, Captaris RightFax). However, with recommendations received from INX, a national provider of advanced technology solutions, the company was steered towards the XMediusFAX fax server solution.

The Solution

Labatt Food Service selected the XMediusFAX Enterprise edition fax server solution to displace their boarded fax landscape. XMediusFAX’s native T.38 software-only, “boardless” solution was regarded to be the “killer” application that the company needed as the foundation for their new fax infrastructure. As well, Sagem- Interstar’s long standing relationship and proven interoperability with Cisco gear proved to be instrumental in choosing XMediusFAX.

Labatt Food Service deployed an 8-channel XMediusFAX Enterprise edition fax server solution. The system was configured to run in a VMware virtualized environment with Windows 2003 Server, and H.323 integrated with Cisco’s Unified Communications Manager 6.1, to send and receive faxes across 8 cities to a combination of H.323 and MGCP controlled gateways.

By migrating to the XMediusFAX Enterprise edition, Labatt Food Service now enjoys the benefits of having a completely software based IP fax server solution that is highly scalable. By simply licensing extra channels, the company can address evolving fax traffic growth without the need to purchase any hardware.

Benefits and Results

Deploying the XMediusFAX Enterprise edition at Labatt Food Service has provided the company and its employees a reliable and robust fax solution. Hardware related issues as well as all the other “fax problems” associated to legacy fax solutions have all been eliminated.

Today, the company deems the following key functional features of XMediusFAX to be of greatest benefit, as it has provided them the ability to:

• Gather Performance Monitoring (PM) statistics to tie into a 3rd party application
• Use multiple channels for each system rather than 1:1 in the analog world
• Use existing database mining software to tie into the MySQL database and generate reports
• Minimized hardware footprint and reduced energy consumption
• Integrate with their existing phone system
• Integrate with Active Directory

The company’s future plans include the use of the redundancy features within XMediusFAX to enable fax survivability via an Active-Passive configuration to establish off-site disaster recovery.

In summary, the company is currently reaping the following operational and financial benefits:

• Increased fax success rate and end-user satisfaction while reducing the adminstration time for managing the fax process
• Operational simplicity
• Tangible savings in the reduction of paper, ink, toner, printers, maintenance contracts, etc.
• Increased ROI on current VoIP investment reduced energy consumption
• Reduced Total Cost of Ownership (TCO)