The McCabe Group is a civil engineering firm with 200 staff, based in the south-east of England. Typically its eight production managers have to manage about 30 sites between them, which involves daily driving between sites.

Until recently, a major headache for the firm was getting paper documents such as contracts, blueprints and plans to those managers. These documents, says IT manager Nigel Kilford, represent company-vital information that enable managers to make sure that they are matching clients’ requirements.

To receive the documents, the managers either had to find an office with a fax machine, or come back to the main office to collect the documents in person. Each manager was wasting about an hour each day this way – a total of 40 hours, or one member of staff, each week. In financial terms, says Kilford, that was equivalent to £1,000 a week.

Kilford considered issuing each manager with portable fax machines, but each machine would have cost about £700, and there was an additional problem of having to find power points and phone sockets. Instead, he chose to subscribe to eFax, a service it has been using since November 2005. Provided by j2Global, it converts paper faxes to PDF files and emails them to the recipient.

The sender dials the recipient’s virtual fax number, but the person receiving the fax sees only an email with a PDF attachment in their inbox.

‘The person receiving the fax doesn’t need to be standing next to the machine. When they open their laptop and connect to the server, the emails all come down in one go so there is no downtime,’ says Kilford.

Connectivity is also a better way of viewing the documents, he says, because Acrobat allows users to zoom in to view in greater detail. An additional advantage is that paper documents do not get lost or accidentally destroyed.

Shortly before the firm decided to adopt the software, the production managers had already been issued with 3G-enabled laptops, so there was no additional hardware expense.

The firm has a mobile contract with Vodafone, so faxes are sent wirelessly over GPRS, and production managers do not need to find a phone socket for their laptops. Managers are now also being supplied with Windows Mobile handsets, to make viewing emails even easier.