Electronics Design
Sign of the times
4 Ronan Lavelle shows how electronics and engineering designers can save time and money with digital signatures.
4 Ronan Lavelle montre comment les ingénieurs en électronique et les concepteurs de circuits électroniques peuvent économiser du temps et de l’argent grâce aux signatures numériques.
4 Ronan Lavelle zeigt, wie Elektronikentwickler und Ingenieure mit digitalen Signaturen Zeit und Geld sparen können.
E
lectronics designers, engineers and managers’ time gets sapped in all kinds of ways, some more obvious, but others less so. A good example of the latter
is the time spent printing out and signing documents, drawings and diagrams, often as part of a project’s approval process (internally, with contractors and customers). Independent research has estimated that
up to 40 per cent of engineering documents (of all kinds) need a signature or seal of some kind. In engineering and design, wet signatures
can approach $80 per drawing and if 5,000- 15,000 drawings are produced on average per project, that is potentially tying up a lot of time, effort and money. Research carried out by AIIM, the
global industry organisation for information professionals, found that 58 per cent of organisations have processes for which signatures are considered essential, and 44 per cent interrupt at least half of their
processes in order to collect signatures, adding up to an average delay of more than three days per process. Forty eight per cent of process documents
are printed just for adding signatures and that number jumps to more than 80 per cent for a quarter of all organisations.
Paperless environment
Further, for any organisation attempting to establish a paperless environment with end- to-end workflows, printing documents just for signing is the weak link in the chain. The challenge for many engineering
organisations is that signatures have to adhere to security standards and compliance requirements, while standing up to legal scrutiny. While paper-based signatures, which are
arguably easy to forge, achieve this on the whole, basic scanned-in electronic signatures – such as bitmap images – do not, but there is an answer: digital signatures. So what exactly are digital signatures, what
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