ROI - Return On Investment

Return on investment is often intangible - we can all see the benefit but find it hard to put down the figures.   Fax solutions deliver a lot of intangible benefits (sometimes called soft benefits) but they also deliver some very powerful tangible savings.

A European study concluded that sending an electronic fax saved, on average 7 minutes of an employee's time per fax.  Thus the biggest cost saving achieved with a unified communications fax solution is the employee time saved in sending a fax message.  Another cost associated with manual fax machines is the cost of consumables.

The ROI calculation for FAX unified messaging

The UK average national salary for full-time workers in April 2004 was £21,944, or £10.41/hr according to the Office of National Statistics. Thus, on average, the sending of an electronic fax saves £1.21 per transmission. The productivity gains using an integrated fax solution is shown in the following table.

	Number of Faxes per week
	100	200	500	1000	2000
Weekly productivity gain	£121	£242	£605	£1,210	£2,420

A 15m fax roll will cost approximately £2.50.   A 15M roll will create up to 50 pages of fax ( probably less when transmission reports are considered).  An average fax is 3 pages (1 x header & 2 x text/image). Thus a £2.50 fax roll will support 16.5 faxes. This gives the cost of paper at 0.15p per fax received.

If a business receives 200 faxes per day (1000 per week) they will save £150 per week on fax paper.

The total benefit to a company of deploying a unified messaging fax solution for a business which sends and receives 1000 faxes a week is shown in the table below.

	Per week	Per Year
Saving on consumables	£150	£7,800
Productivity gains	£1,210	£62,920
Total benefit to business	£1,360	£70,720