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magazine
Many businesses today are seeking to
cut paper use and implement electronic
workflows for routine business
processes.Where they have been able
to do so, businesses report significant
productivity gains. According to a recent
survey by AIIM, the association for image
management professionals, two thirds of
organisations that have adopted paper-
free processes have seen payback within
18 months and half within 12 months.
With such clear gains, you would
expect a rapid adoption of electronic
workflows. However, AIIM’s study,
Winning
the Paper Wars
, shows that progress is still
slow. Among the 562 respondents to its
survey, 47% have made only 5% progress
towards updating processes that could be
paper-free; 19% said they had actually
increased their use of paper.
So what is holding businesses back?
Almost 40% of respondents said the
biggest obstacles to paper-free processes
were the need for physical signatures and
legal admissibility, even though electronic
documents and digital signatures are
legally valid.
Slow adoption
AIIM’s findings are corroborated by
separate research released by digital
signature specialist ARX to coincide
withWorld Paper Free Day (October
24, 2013). This found that 84% of
businesses print documents just so that
they can be signed. More than six out of
10 organisations print extra copies for
the same reason. The need for a ‘wet’
signature delayed processes in 72% of
organisations.
ARX UK country manager Ronan
Lavelle said: “Earlier this year we did a
global study with AIIM (
Digital Signatures
– Making the Business Case
) and this
found that almost 50% of documents
in enterprises are required to have some
kind of signature on them: half of those
are printed and it takes a day to two or
three days to get a signature on a single
document. A lot of this is to do with
corporate culture, because electronic and
digital signatures are legally binding in
England,Wales and Scotland, as well and
EU countries and North America.”
He cites several reasons why
organisations have been slow to
adopt digital signatures, from cultural
considerations to technology-readiness,
but believes that the convenience of not
having to print, sign and scan documents
is driving a change in attitudes.
“When you receive a document you
need to stop what you are doing and print
it out; then find a scanner, scan it back in
and save it to your computer; and then
upload it back as an attachment to an
email or into a document management
system. That process is becoming an
unacceptable hassle for many business
managers. For the first time ever, I saw an
analyst report by Gartner last year that
quoted convenience as one of the drivers
for adopting digital signatures,” Lavelle said.
Simple process
ARX’s CoSign is a much simpler process.
Based on Public Key Infrastructure (PKI)
technology, CoSign captures a user’s
handwritten signature just once and, at
the same time, creates a digital identity
or digital fingerprint for them. The latter is
the most important element; the JPEG of
the signature isn’t strictly necessary and is
used purely for cultural acceptance.
CoSign can be embedded in common
office applications so that when a user
wants to sign a document all they have
to do is click the sign button. This creates
a document hash that is sent to the
CoSign server (either on premise or in
the cloud). A digital signature containing
the user’s digital fingerprint and graphic
signature is sent back to the application
and embedded in the document.
According to Lavelle, the whole process
takes less than 5 seconds.
“We tell our customers that they
should benchmark our CoSign solution
against their current processes and time
how long it takes to sign a document. Our
tests show that it takes 5-7 minutes on
average to open a PDF or Word document,
Paperless Office
Sign of the times
The need for signatures on documents is a major obstacle on the
path to the paperless office, but things could at last be changing.
print it, sign it, scan it, upload it and
send it on again.We save at least several
minutes per document. If an organisation
has tens of thousands or millions of
documents that need to be signed each
year, CoSign gives them an instant boost
in productivity for very little pain,” he
explained.
Strong growth
Although adoption has been slow to date,
Lavelle says the market grew by 50%
last year and interest has been steadily
building especially in sales, marketing
and procurement departments that deal
with third parties and have processes
that require signatures, such as quotes,
contracts, waivers and NDAs.
“We are about to start a project with
a UK energy company which sells energy
contracts to corporate customers. They
have about 30,000 new customers every
year and wanted to replace a process
where they emailed their Ts&Cs, contracts
and pricing plans as attachments, which
the customer had to print out, sign, scan
and send back. That process caused huge
problems because they weren’t in control
of the timeline: they had no idea when the
customer was going to sign and send back
the contracts; and quite often customers
would send the signature page back and
not the rest of the agreement. It created a
lot of hassle,” he said.
“Now, what they want to do is develop
a branded portal into which they can
upload things like bills, terms & conditions
and contracts. A third party will instantly
be alerted and get an email that says
‘X wants you to review the contract’.
You then click on the link in the email and
authenticate yourself to open and view
the document to be signed in an online
document viewer within the portal. You
press sign and off you go. You get a copy,
they get a copy and it kicks off workflow
processes.”
Lavelle says the CoSign system is much
simpler than talk of digital encryption,
certificates and PKI signing keys make it
sound. It is just a question of installing an
IBM server that ARX ships with everything
on it, which you connect to your user
directories. Alternatively you can use
ARX’s secure cloud service, which is only
used to generate the digital signature –
the document always remain within the
corporate environment.
CoSign is already used by 5 million
users and 10,000 companies worldwide.
Isn’t it time you too saved the time and
expense of printing, signing and scanning
documents and adopted digital signatures
instead?
www.arx.com
Almost
40% of
respondents
said the
biggest
obstacles to
paper-free
processes
were the need
for physical
signatures...
Ronan Lavelle,
UK country
manager, ARX
Electronic
signature
+
Digital signature