Fax Documents from SAP® ERP via Hardware-Free Delivery Channel

The Company

Headquartered in Madrid, Spain, Asturiana de Zinc is one of the world’s largest miners and producers of zinc. With operations spanning Australia, Canada, Germany, Spain, and the United Kingdom, Asturiana de Zinc is one of the commodity business units within Glencore’s major global diversified mining group. Asturiana de Zinc focused on improving productivity and increasing efficiency when additional sites were added to the organization, especially as it related to the burden the new sites had on existing processes.

The Problem

For nearly 10 years, Asturiana de Zinc used RightFax to deliver purchase order output from SAP® ERP.  With the integration of Asturiana de Zinc’s North American sites into the European Asturiana de Zinc organization in 2009, the monthly fax volume increased from 500 to 4,000 faxes. They sought to replace their hardware-based fax server solution and its mounting maintenance cost with a managed/hardware-free, automated solution to meet their new document delivery challenges. Reliability and North American support were key business requirements in evaluating and selecting available solutions.

The Solution

Carlos Caro Martin-Vares, Asturiana de Zinc’s IT General Manager, began researching certified fax solutions for SAP. He quickly decided to take advantage of STR Software’s Proof of Concepts for AventX for SAP. Martin-Vares was pleased to see an STR Software engineer install and prove software in less than two  (2) hours — “Once I showed AventX to my SAP Administrator, we were ready to buy and use it. It was quick to install and easy to use!”

As required by Asturiana de Zinc, STR Software’s integration with SAP provided the flexibility to use a hardware-free fax delivery channel. In this model, faxes are transmitted from SAP to AventX and delivered to the end recipient over a secure internet connection.  The result is that Asturiana de Zinc took advantage of an unlimited number of internet-based fax lines and easily scaled to the then 8x increase in fax volume created from joining the North American sites with the European operations.

After going live with AventX for SAP, Asturiana de Zinc delivered over 10,000 pages a month with accurate, real-time fax delivery status directly in SAP Office. “Delivery confirmation was critical for end users in order to instill confidence in the new system,” said Carlos Caro Martin-Vares.