When implemented properly, these eSignature processes can save hours of effort, especially in high-volume situations such as contracts, invoicing, or Human Resources.
In today's digital age, it is reasonable to expect that an effective eSignature process can be faster and more cost effective with businesses seeing an average savings of $20 per eSignature over the traditional signing process while still maintaining the same level of security. When implemented properly, these eSignature processes can save hours of effort, especially in high-volume situations such as contracts, invoicing, or Human Resources.
Key benefits of eSignature:
Businesses that go paperless reduce their processing errors by an average of 90%.
Expedited processes to obtain signatures on documents. Physical signature can take on average 5 days to obtain compared to e-Signature taking on average only 37 minutes.
Businesses have noted a reduction in operating costs by approximately 66% after migrating to an e-Signature app from physical paper signatures (this considering all required materials, administration times, and shipping/subscription costs).
The time spent by customers or clients viewing and signing documents can be reduced by 40%.
Tips for implementing eSignature properly. When considering eSignature, you should look at the following aspects of your process: Identify which processes use signatures and at which points. Measure the time and resources needed to support signing documents within that process. This will provide you with a baseline and a case for change. During this review, it is highly recommended that you have this conversation internally and ensure you have support for the transformation.
Review the legalities of eSignature in your industry. Many industries have become accepting of eSignature, and only a few situations where physical signatures are still mandatory.
Bring your people along for the transformation. Give them effective change management to improve adoption and uptake of the tool once it is implemented.
Launch in phases, reducing the overall impact and allowing you to have more time to address issues.
Integrate! By far the largest complaint about eSignature processes is the need to manually file signed copies of documents. All the leaders in the eSignature space can be integrated with your document management solution. Using this integration, users can request signatures directly from the document management tool, and when the document is fully signed, it is automatically put back in the document management tool and filed away. No more trying to track final copies down in email.
What tools do I need for eSignature?
You will want to integrate your eSignature tool with a document management system such as Microsoft SharePoint or OpenText Content Server. Once you have an effective home for your eSignature documents, programs such as DocuSign, Adobe Sign, or (the soon-to-be-released) Microsoft Syntex eSignature may be used.
Microsoft Syntex eSignature
Soon to be released to SharePoint Online users, Syntex eSignature allows you to send electronic signature requests directly from SharePoint Online. Your content stays in the Microsoft 365 SharePoint folder while it is being reviewed and signed, thus simplifying, and streamlining the process of requesting the signature and managing its outputs.
Syntex eSignature will be in private preview Summer 2023 and fully available later in 2023. In the initial release Syntex eSignature will support the PDF format, other file formats such as Word will be rolled out later.