For example, Web-based ordering is a great alternative, but it won't work if customers don't want to play ball. "In the early '90s, we thought everyone would go to the Internet. Five years later, we found that we had more paper than ever," says Boren Novakovic, Whirlpool's senior supply chain strategy manager for the North American region. The problem: The appliance maker receives more than 1.5 million orders a year from home builders who still send them in by fax.

Whirlpool couldn't eliminate its fax machines because those customers often work in the field and don't have Internet access. "If they want to do it by fax and we can't accommodate that, they will ... go to another product manufacturer," says Ehrman.

Now Whirlpool captures incoming faxes digitally, rather than printing them out. A new document-exchange system from Esker Inc. in Madison, Wis., receives incoming faxes and archives the images to an IBM DB2 CommonStore repository.

In the next phase, currently in pilot, Whirlpool will use optical character recognition (OCR) technology to automatically extract data from faxed forms and route them to its SAP system, which will process the orders and fax back a confirmation.

Extracting data from images is tricky, however. Whirlpool's plan calls for a 95 percent pass-through rate on incoming faxes, but success will depend on a change in business processes: getting customers to use standard forms.