WBB Minerals – a Fax solution Case Study

WBB Minerals integrated OpenText RightFax with Lotus Notes to provide centralised fax/email communications

Extracting and processing millions of tons of minerals annually

WBB Minerals, part of the multi-national Sibelco Group, operates in 9 countries across Europe. They extract and process millions of tons of materials each year and supply customers in the ceramics, glass, foundry, sports and leisure and construction sectors.

A need to centralise faxing

WBB Minerals were looking to reduce the number of fax machines in the company in line with new Multi-Function Printers capable of scanning to email.

David Rovira, Technical Manager at WBB Minerals, states;

“The faxing element was important, but we were also looking for a solution that would fit in with our strategy of one central communication medium. We particularly wanted a system that provided the benefits of enabling the use of email to fax and offered electronic communication alternatives.”

Electronic faxing

OpenText RightFax is an e-document delivery program. It gives users the ability to send and receive documents via fax, e-mail, and the Internet. It is compatible with a wide range of business applications and makes transmitting documents as easy as printing them on a network printer. It includes a phonebook and library, making it easy to access frequently used contacts and documents.

David continues: “We were recommended RightFax by our current Formscape Maintainer, Datatrade. Following an evaluation of products we decided that RightFax was the best suited to our requirements and purchased the system through Datatrade plc, a reseller partner for ProcessFlows.”

Datatrade work closely with ProcessFlows. Jonathan Annis – Account Manager at Datatrade plc went on to say, “Datatrade has called on ProcessFlows for a number of installations as RightFax is the ‘best fit’ with our output management solutions. The installation for WBB Minerals was another such occasion where the professional approach and expertise of both organisations was required, together with the right mix of document software solutions. Yet again this combination has proven successful.”

RightFax with Lotus Notes

WBB Minerals have installed a dedicated fax server that has the Lotus notes client installed. Emails are routed through a Lotus Notes gateway to RightFax. Formscape takes orders from their JD Edwards accounting package and prints them to fax overnight.

Business process improvements

One of the first noticeable improvements was in the Purchase Order section where RightFax is being used to fax out all the purchase orders. David explains, “Network faxing of Purchase Orders has significantly improved this part of the business. It no longer means that somebody has to manually send faxes or hand mail the orders.” David continues,

“The new system has also made receiving faxes significantly easier. We can also still utilise RightFax for hard copies if required as we simply scan the documents into the system. This makes traceability far better.”

Support and installation involved dealing with both ProcessFlows and Datatrade. “Good service and staff” was David’s succinct reply when questioned about the service and support from both companies.

“The faxing element was important, but we were also looking for a solution that would fit in with our strategy of one central communication medium” David Rovira, Technical Manager