Sustainable Food Logistics Provider Faxes with Telekom Partner Retarus

In Use: High-Maintenance Fax Servers

IFCO has a global pool of more than 380 million reusable packaging containers (RPCs) that producers use for 2 billion deliveries of fresh fruit and vegetables, meat, poultry, seafood, eggs, bread, and other products to retailers each year. IFCO’s RPCs make sure the food supply chain is optimized by preserving the freshness and quality of products, lowering costs, reducing spoilage, and providing a more environmentally friendly solution than disposable packaging.

Customers can order these reusable containers by email, fax, or via the company’s online ordering system. Before switching to cloud services offered by Telekom partner Retarus, IFCO used to send and receive faxes via high-maintenance fax servers and fax machines.

Wanted: A Global Cloud Fax Service Provider

IFCO’s customers and partners include smaller agricultural businesses that still use fax for communications and orders. This is particularly true for customers in Japan.

When IFCO switched internally to Microsoft Teams for telephony, a synchronized fax solution was required. At the same time, the company wanted to digitize and replace its analog fax hardware, but didn’t want to host a call or fax management solution. That’s why IFCO started looking for a suitable cloud fax service provider — one that also operates globally but can provide local points of contact as well.

With Retarus, Telekom had the right partner at its side to manage and guarantee a smooth integration and deployment from local data centers.

Rapid Implementation and Employee Training

Retarus Cloud Fax was successfully implemented at IFCO in Germany at the end of June 2022 and just a few months later, in September 2022, in Japan. IFCO had placed its first request with Telekom in March 2022. After evaluating the technical framework parameters and ensuing intensive discussions, the fax solution was successfully implemented within six months.

Flexible Retarus APIs made implementation and execution considerably easier. Employees were able to use the new fax service after just a short period of time and required only minimal training. IFCO’s departments requested to keep their old numbers. As a result, they were simply redirected to Retarus so they could continue to be used. Employees in Japan also wanted a separate fax management solution, so a “CRM light” was developed and implemented for them.

A Highly Available, Efficient Ordering Process for IFCO Customers

By outsourcing its fax operations to Telekom partner Retarus, IFCO can offer its customers a fax service that has high availability. Thanks to pay-per-use billing, IFCO pays only for fax pages actually sent and received. IFCO’s administrators maintain an overview and manage the services used at all times in the myEAS admin portal.

Digitization not only saves paper, but also makes order processes significantly more efficient overall.

The Future Holds Plans to Also Send Emails via Retarus

IFCO employees in Japan, Germany, and Switzerland are already working successfully with the Cloud Fax solution from Telekom partner Retarus. The service has been seamlessly integrated into their email workflow. Faxes can be created and sent like emails while inbound faxes arrive as PDF attachments. The next step for IFCO is to use Transactional Email for sending emails.