Electronics Design


Electronics and engineering designers can save time and money with digital signatures.


Sign of the times E 36 www.engineerlive.com


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


Page 1  |  Page 2  |  Page 3  |  Page 4  |  Page 5  |  Page 6  |  Page 7  |  Page 8  |  Page 9  |  Page 10  |  Page 11  |  Page 12  |  Page 13  |  Page 14  |  Page 15  |  Page 16  |  Page 17  |  Page 18  |  Page 19  |  Page 20  |  Page 21  |  Page 22  |  Page 23  |  Page 24  |  Page 25  |  Page 26  |  Page 27  |  Page 28  |  Page 29  |  Page 30  |  Page 31  |  Page 32  |  Page 33  |  Page 34  |  Page 35  |  Page 36  |  Page 37  |  Page 38  |  Page 39