Electronics Design
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.
as Adobe Reader and Microsoft Office. These features, which are built into any reliable digital signature solution, provide compliance with a raft of international laws and regulations.
The main hard benefits cited by early adopters include faster and more cost- effective approval processes.
Anecdotes from users typically talk about signatures taking hours to collect instead of days for local projects or weeks for international projects, and significant paper-related cost reductions such as printing, filing, faxing and couriering.
Less easy to measure but arguably just as important (if not more so) are the improvements to business processes, which become more streamlined and efficient. Digital signature solutions can be integrated with workflow, BPM and ECM solutions such as SharePoint, OpenText and Oracle, as well as industry-specific
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 is different about them, how do they work and what are their inherent benefits?
Defining digital signatures Using digital certificates, PKI technology and the organisation’s own authentication mechanisms, standards-based digital signatures (as opposed to simple electronic signatures that often offer nothing more than a JPEG image of a signature) create legally enforceable records. Not only are these fully secure, but they also provide long term proof of the identity and intent of the signer, as well as of the document’s integrity, and ensure that these are easy to validate and verify using widely available tools such
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