Gommunications innovations

I NTRODUCING the latest develop- I ments in CD ROM and fax technology to the building materials business is fast improving communications with suppliers, customers and prospects.

CD ROM resembles a musical compact disc but stores data, text, images, graphics, audio and video. With its drive connected to the PC, a CD ROM holds many times the information captured on a typical computer disc and data may be retrieved almost instantaneously. Up to 300,000 pages can be searched for exact. detailed information in seconds.

The North American Forest Products Almanac CD ROM from Optical Data Systems Inc., Seattle, Wa., contains nearly 13,000 listings for all primary and secondary wood products producers in the U.S. and Canada, including wholesalers, distributors, remanufacturers, conunodity brokers, rail reloaders, exporters, importers, associations and consultants.

Query search permits up to I 25 field parameters on any listing, so, for example, on a single search you could locate all the companies in Alabama, Georgia and North Carolina selling I"x4"xI2" surfaced southern yellow pine with paper wrap and shipped by rail. The Almanac is updated every six months.

The system can also create mailing labels and mail merge form letters for instant print out on desktop printers. Tabulated search results can be instantly viewed as text, bar graphs, pie charts or tables. Users need only an IBM or compatible personal computer with 2 meg of memory and a hard drive.

Story at a Glance

Full motion video and audio ("multimedia") capabilities allow advertisers to insert video messages or still images along with theircompany's listing or in a video "yellow pages" section.

Now in development are the 1992 Intemational Forest Products CD ROM, which includes 25 years of annual data on imports and exports, for both volume and value ofhundreds ofwood and paper products for every country in the world, and the 1992 United States Wood Products Trade CD ROM, featuring imports and exports of all wood products between every customs district in the U.S. and all other countries.

Lumber companies are also finding new uses for fax systems. TNT Lumber, Alamo, Ca., now distributes a weekly fax bulletin, providing lumber buyers and sellers with current weekly price and availability updates. Buyers simply submit the lumber products they use to receive their customized list.

Their inquiries are in turn faxed to neady every U.S. West Coast and Canadian sawmill or to certain ones by group, species or size. Currently more than 400 buyers and sellers are subscribing to the free TNT Fax Network.

A new communications system developed by American International Facsimile Producers (a division of American Intemational Forest Products) is changing the image of fax from a convenience to a mail alternative for the delivery of bulk business documents. The Host-Fax system, which looks and acts like a printer to almost any host computer system, handles the entire process from building the document to managing the faxing. Internal copies of the outbound documents are printed on an attached laser printer to replace the bulky line printer and multipart forms. Any documentthat canbe printed from the host system canbe delivered via fax for the price ofa 3O-second phone call. The cost for most organizations is less than 70 per page.

Pope & Talbot is among the first to use the technology to cut transit times for documents and save considerable costs.

They deliver in excess of 4,500 invoices and order acknowledgments monthly directly from theirIBM mainframe computer systems to their customers via Host-Fax.

The system requires no changes in the way Pope & Talbot does business or operates its computer systems. It takes the information that would be printed on a line printer on multipart forms and creates an exact image of the finished document for delivery via fax. The data from the computer is laid over an electronic image of the multipart form background and the completed document is delivered by fax over regular phone lines to its destination fax machine.

Because the document is created and delivered electronically, it is higher in quality and readability than the mailed document with instant delivery. Wood products credit manager Roger Brown, who championed the project at Pope & Talbot, has seen a significant drop in costs related to mailing documents as well as other tangible savings. Days sales outstanding has dropped 10%, partly from the quick delivery of invoices and partly because the Host-Fax is an easy way to send out reminders to customers. Previously, Brown's staff had to call on all late invoices. often sending a faxed copy. Now they call dnly onthose thatare seriously pastdue with Host-Faxhandling routinereminders automatically.

In determining payback for the HostFax system, use a cost of 800 per piece of mail. If 100 pieces were faxed each day instead of mailed, payback based ona2l day month, could be as little as 9.2 months, depending on the model purchased. Naturally, the system would be most feasible for a large company.

In l99l about 2% of all business documents were delivered by fax. As thermal fax machines give way to plain paper models, the figure should balloon to 2O% by 1995. Visionary companies are already improving utilization of these new communication innovations.