We’ve all heard the popular phrase “don’t
re-invent the wheel.” So when it’s time to look
at age old practices like processing paper documents, contracts
and forms it’s prudent to proceed with caution.
The obvious environmental and cost savings in electronic
agreement and digital signature products are many: Whether
it’s the overall reduction of a company’s carbon
footprint, the end of paper storage or the courier costs
of shipping and processing paper around the world, more and
more companies are seeing green initiatives as imperative.
Electronic agreements and digital signatures are no longer
the future; they are here and ready to ease the burden on
many aspects of business communication.
If change is on your radar screen, the key is to make it
scalable, roll it out one business unit at a time and choose
a system that doesn’t require a monolithic ‘big
bang’ implementation.
The ability to start and end digital with electronic agreements
and digital signatures allows organizations to minimize risk,
eliminate mail, fax and courier, reduce administration costs
and streamline processes.
Federal laws combined with business needs have finally made
digital signatures a legal and valid alternative to traditional
pen and paper-based contracts.
Step back for a minute and analyze the traditional business
process. You’ve got a contract that needs to get from
London to Cincinnati tomorrow. After you print it, sign it
and insert it into the fax machine or wait for the courier,
consider a few questions:
• How do you know the status of your contract?
•
How do you know your end recipient or customer is sensitive
to your timeline?
Now, let’s assume the contract is returned by the
deadline. What do you do with it now?
•
Enter the data into back office systems?
•
Scan it, file it and hope you can find it again?
At the end of this time, energy and cost-consuming process,
how much did this all cost?
According to IDC, US companies spend $25 to $35 billion
processing, filing, storing and retrieving paper. Management
of documents over their life cycle pushes that figure up
to $100 billion a year.
Once you receive the ‘completed’ document, keep
your fingers crossed that there aren’t any legal, audit,
critical information or signatures missing, because when
there are holes in your document trail the costs of settlement,
litigation and lost goodwill can be enormous.
In 1995, Coopers and Lybrand released a study that showed
that the average office:
•
Makes 19 copies of each document;
•
Spends $250 recreating each lost document;
•
Spends $20 on labor for filing each document;
•
Loses 1 out of 20 documents;
•
Spends $120 searching for every misfiled document; and
•
Spends $25,000 to fill a 4-drawer file cabinet and $2,000
annually to maintain it!
The next question one must ask is: what is that costing
my business in today’s dollars?
At the end of the day, switching to a system that utilizes
the company’s existing IT infrastructure and harnesses
the power of interactivity will save even more money because
most digital signature platforms are scalable and flexible.
Isn’t that what the future of technology is all about?
As companies are expected to do more with fewer resources,
it’s time to consider a solution that doesn’t
re-invent the wheel, but only refines it. Add to that the
prospect of being green and reducing your overall carbon
footprint and you’ve made the wheel turn a lot more
efficiently.
It’s time to start digital, and end digital.
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