Office Depot

Stationery giant makes savings with Open Text Fax Server, RightFax Edition

The Customer:

Office Depot is recognised as a world leader in stationery and office products. The company’s best-known brand is Niceday, but the 7,000 plus items in their catalogue also include computer consumables, print management and office furnishings.

Part of an international group, Office Depot has 25 locations in the UK with 5,000 employees. They have close to a 60% market share, with major customers including BT, Lloyds TSB, many local councils and NHS trusts.

The Products:

Since 2002, the company has bought Fax Server with SAP connector and integration with Microsoft Exchange, AVST CallXpress and Text Message Server from Avanquest.

The Challenges:

Rob Dore is telecommunications analyst for Office Depot. He and his team in Andover, Hampshire, are responsible for all the company’s communications including nearly 1,000 mobile phones and 2,000 land lines.

Rob first contacted Avanquest to see if they could offer a solution to a specific problem within the 500-strong sales force who deal with customers and potential customers across the UK. As they are on the road most of the time, it was essential to streamline their messaging functionality and give them increased access to telephone and email messages.

A second challenge was to try and update the system for receiving orders and issuing invoices by fax. At Office Depot’s Andover Customer Service Centre alone, 28 fax machines were in constant use, taking thousands of orders every day – a system which was proving labour intensive and very costly.

The Solution:

Communications with the sales team were revolutionised by Avanquest’s CallXpress unified messaging. This has given staff access to all their messages, voicemail, faxes and e-mail, by phone, networked PC or the Internet. The system also integrates with MS Exchange and Lotus Notes. All types of message can be picked up easily from a phone, mobile, laptop or PC, so that the chances of someone missing a vital message are now virtually nil.

Rob said: “It is a big wow factor with the sales team – it really does what it says. We offer a fantastic response to our customers and it is very unusual for something to go wrong.” He added: “All of these products really go a long way in ensuring that we continue to meet the high standards of service that our customers have come to expect.“

An answer to Office Depot’s fax problem was provided by Fax Server software. This provides all the benefits of an electronic system by automating the flow of faxes and data while allowing full integration with other core business applications.

Fax Server was installed in 2003, allowing customers to fax their orders in the same way as before, but enabling them to be received electronically by Office Depot and leading to impressive savings in time and overheads.

The Benefits:

Since investing in Fax Server, Office Depot has been able to dispose of most of its fax machines, saving around £1,000 a week in maintenance
costs at each location.

Staff in the Customer Service Centre have seen their workload reduce, allowing them to spend more time processing orders – with a corresponding increase in speed of despatch and accuracy.

Even bigger savings are on the way. Office Depot have recently bought Avanquest’s SAP connector to integrate Fax Server with their financial systems, allowing invoices to be sent out by fax. As around 40,000 invoices are sent out each month by post, costing 33p each, this will save over £100,000 a year and give the company an enviable return on its investment.
The SAP connector will also allow other documentation including proofs of delivery, order queries and copy invoices to be generated and transmitted directly from the main system.

The latest innovation to be adopted by Office Depot is Avanquest’s Text Message Server – TMS. This allows mobile staff including sales representatives and delivery drivers to receive a text alert whenever there is an important voicemail or e-mail message for them. The same system is being used to ‘baby mind’ the company’s UK computer network 24 hours a day and send an automatic alert to the on-call IT staff if there is a technical problem. This has removed the need to retain engineers on duty overnight. TMS is exceptionally easy to use, since messages are sent from desktop PCs rather than the tiny keypads of mobile handsets.

Support and Training:

Office Depot have been impressed by the simplicity and user-friendliness of the Avanquest products. Rob says: “We have never had to train anyone – they have a single-page user guide to get them started, then there is an electronic user guide they can consult if they need to know more.”

The Future:

Avanquest continue to work with Office Depot to help the company obtain further value from its investment. Projects currently way should make it possible to:

• Electronically read incoming for product bar codes and them into the ordering system be processed
• Further automate business processes and achieve electronic delivery of more outbound documentation
• Integrate fully with the company’s Xerox machines, allowing even more fax machines to be consigned to the skip.

“All of these products really go a long way in ensuring that we continue to meet the high standards of service that our customers have come to expect”

“In the first eight months of 2004 we cut our overheads by up to £6,000 a month, helping to increase our profit margins, and I am confident that some of this can be attributed to the use of Fax Server” Rob Dore, Telecommunications Analyst

More information

For information on any of our solutions or products, please call us on 01962 835053 or email sales@processflows.co.uk.