It’s 2025. Why the Heck Are We Still Using Faxes?
By Steve Hatajlo
Look, we live in a world where your fridge can order groceries, and AI can write your emails. And yet, in supply chain offices, logistics hubs, and backrooms of massive retailers, fax machines are still whirring and email inboxes are jammed with PDF.
They’re still routing purchase orders, load tenders, and invoices from suppliers for everyone from small mom-and-pop shops to big businesses.
So, Who’s Still Using Faxes?
Everyone from Dolly Parton (she prefers faxes to texts) to major British railways are still using faxes.
In October 2024, Northern Rail in the UK admitted that staff were using faxes to communicate cancellations and other pivotal internal comms via fax.
A recent survey of more than 600 German businesses found that 77 percent of the companies surveyed still use faxes.
Globally at least 17% of businesses are still using faxes.
Why? Not Everyone Made It to eCommerce
Sure, you might’ve embraced eCommerce and API integrations. You’ve got an EDI VAN or AS2 connection, a WMS, and maybe even a dashboard that shows real-time order data.
But not all your trading partners got the memo. Plenty of vendors, carriers, and even large retailers still send critical documents—POs, invoices, advanced shipment notices—as faxes or emailed PDFs.
Why? Because it works. And they haven’t felt enough pain to change it.
You, on the other hand? You’re stuck rekeying all that data into your WMS, TMS or ERP. That’s where the real problem begins.
Faxing + Manual Work = Losing Time and Money
Every time someone on your team opens a faxed or other “electronic paper” document and starts keying its contents into a system, money quietly disappears. Time is lost. Errors creep in. And no one’s even talking about the true cost.
Let’s get specific—according to Aberdeen Research, more than 25% of businesses surveyed feel that:
- The cost of managing documents is too high
- The volume is too large to keep up with
- The time it takes to use and process documents is too long
Add all those issues into a business dealing with thousands of orders or invoices a month, and boom—you’re spending tens of thousands of thousands per year copying data from PDFs and faxes into something your system can use.
A miskey can also lead to a delayed shipment, a chargeback, or worse—an angry email from a national retailer with “URGENT” in the subject line.
Bridging the Gap
That’s where FSI steps in. While the rest of the world debates whether fax should still exist, FSI helps bridge the gap between analog documents and digital operations. Our document conversion services are purpose-built for industries like retail and logistics, where faxed and emailed orders, invoices, and shipment notices are still a daily reality.
Imagine having your incoming faxes—along with PDFs, Excel sheets, and other non-standard formats—converted into clean, structured data that flows seamlessly into your ERP, TMS, or WMS. It’s automation that meets your business where it actually is, not where the tech world thinks it should be.