Posts Tagged ‘digital signature research’

SANOFI Saves Millions with Online Collaboration and Digital Signatures

Wednesday, August 10th, 2011

Don’t you just love success stories? I do. For starters, they’re the best evidence that – despite any suspicion or skepticism – some things actually work. And for people or organizations that are on the fence about making moves like going paperless or, say, adopting digital signatures, success stories can provide real-life proof for how things work and what benefits they provide.

For SANOFI, a multinational pharmaceutical company, very good things are happening thanks to their adoption of a clinical trial portal equipped with digital signatures – and now you can read about it in the SANOFI case study provided by NextDocs. By going digital in their management of global drug trials, SANOFI eliminated the profusion of added costs, wasted staff time, and project delays that were incurred by the reliance on paper. According to the case study, “the new solution…is expected to save an estimated 10,000 working days,” which cost the organization $9 million in time that was wasted on managing documents. Now those are some serious savings. If you’re interested in learning more about digital signatures in clinical operations, check out this 2-minute video. Enjoy!

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Posted in Digital Signatures - General, Life Science | No Comments »

Digital Signatures a Key for Microsoft SharePoint

Friday, July 1st, 2011

Microsoft SharePoint has become ubiquitous. I mean, who hasn’t heard of SharePoint? The multi-purpose document management platform is being used across industries for a whole host of workflow processes, such as project reports, staff claims, purchase requisitions, etc. And, as applications become more business-critical, processes – including those with legal implications – are finding their ways into SharePoint and creating the need for secure, legally-enforceable, and manageable automated signature capability.

Enter digital signatures for SharePoint – the tool that can enable SharePoint users to achieve fully electronic workflows through the approval stage. AIIM, the leading authority in document management and workflow automation, did a study called Digital Signatures for Document Management and SharePoint. As part of the study, AIIM asked 231 SharePoint users about their signature requirements within SharePoint. Here’s what they found:

To learn more about these findings and others, download the free AIIM study.

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Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »

Paperless Clinical Trial Study Examined by U.S. Government Officials

Friday, April 22nd, 2011

I recently found a very interesting article on HealthcareIT News that reports on a study involving the National Cancer Institute’s Cancer Therapy Evaluation Program. The study explores how digital identities, digital signatures, and cloud computing accelerate clinical trials and lower costs, and it was reportedly examined by government officials around the Obama administration’s new National Strategy for Trusted Identities in Cyberspace initiative.

The article highlights how digital signatures “guarantee the integrity of documents…by protecting every bit of information from being changed.” In the study, electronic documents were being stored in the “cloud,” enabling researchers to access the information quickly and securely and authorize the documents using digital signatures. This eliminated the need for sending physical documents via courier service or fax solely for the purpose of obtaining signature approvals, thus expediting processes and significantly reducing costs. If you want to read more, check out the HealthcareIT News article.

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Posted in Healthcare | No Comments »

Digital Signatures Coming Soon to a Document Near You

Tuesday, October 5th, 2010

If you’ve been following my blog, you may have noticed the occasional mentions of AIIM, the leading authority in the field of document management and workflow automation. In fact, just a few posts ago I discussed part of AIIM’s great research about the benefits of digital signatures. Today, I welcome you to feast your eyes on Digital Signatures – Coming Soon to a Document Near You, an interesting and resourceful article that was published in AIIM’s e-Doc Magazine.

The article opens with a short overview about what digital signatures are and why they’re needed. This follows with a brief discussion of key points to keep in mind when looking for a digital signature solution. If your organization employs an electronic content management (ECM) system, you might be interested in the section called “How will digital signatures fit in your ECM and Workflow solutions?” But regardless of whether or not you use an ECM, this article is full of useful information about digital signatures and how digital signature technology can reduce costs and expedite processes.

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Digitally Sign Away Your Printer Problems and Paper Jams

Friday, August 20th, 2010

In a previous post entitled “Are you in on the digital signature 4-1-1?” I shared a first-of-its-kind research called Digital Signatures for Document Workflow and SharePoint. The study, conducted by AIIM (a leading authority in the field of document management and workflow automation), revolves around the uses and benefits of digital signatures as perceived by non-users and as experienced by actual digital signature users. One of the areas AIIM explored was: of all the documents you print out, how many are printed solely for the purpose of obtaining signature approvals?

Considering the documents that are printed out as part of your formal approval processes, what proportion would you say are printed for the purpose of adding one or more signatures? (N=290 non-users)

As you can see from the results above, in 42% of organizations without digital signature solutions, three-quarters or more of printed documents are printed only for adding signatures. Imagine what not needing to print these documents could mean for these and similar organizations and their business processes – considering the price of paper and of routing documents to the appropriate signers, and adding that to the amount of time it takes employees to fulfill this process – that’s a heavy handful that digital signatures can completely eliminate. Download the AIIM study for free and find out how organizations use digital signatures to avoid this type of problem, and enjoy added benefits along the way.

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Are you in on the digital signature 4-1-1?

Thursday, April 29th, 2010

In this day and age, it’s customary to check out a product online before buying it, and user reviews tend to come in especially handy during this process. Indeed, getting the 4-1-1 on another person’s experience with a product or solution before adopting it for yourself may greatly impact your decision.

If you’re considering implementing digital signatures, you’d probably be interested in finding out what people who are (and aren’t) using them have to say about it. Fortunately, AIIM – a leading authority in the field of document management and workflow automation – has made it easy to get this information with their recent, first-of-its-kind research entitled Digital Signatures for Document Workflow and SharePoint. In surveying digital signature users and non-users alike, they report on the perceived and actual benefits of the digital signing technology, and inquire on topics like how prevalent formal signatures are in day-to-day business activities for organizations from various industries.

One question AIIM posed in the survey was: Would you say that more than 50% of the main business processes/documents in your organizational unit require formal signatures?

In the graph above, you can see that in the ‘Engineering & Construction’, and ‘Professional services, Legal and Media’ industries, a good amount of processes rely on obtaining signature approvals. What does this imply in terms of digital signatures? If you’d like to know, you can download AIIM’s study for free and find out. Enjoy!

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Posted in Research | 2 Comments »