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Up to 40 per cent of engineering, construction and architectural documents need a signature of some kind and, according to research by AIIM (the global information industry association), half of those documents are printed out just to get them signed.

The cost of gathering signatures using pen and paper can approach £50 per drawing - a significant amount as typically 40% of the many drawings produced per project need to be signed. Automating doesn't help either, as nearly of those companies who have attempted to streamline their processes interrupt their workflows to collect signatures.

AN ENVIRONMENT FOCUSED ON DOCUMENTS AND PROCESSES
Construction, civil engineering and architectural environments are quite document-centric (even when those documents are electronic) and often involve complex review and approval processes with customers, local authorities, contractors, vendors and/or colleagues.

Many have already implemented workflow, business process, enterprise content and document management systems, yet the 'weak link' in the chain is that users often need to revert to paper and print out documents just to get them signed, and, apart from security and compliance requirements, those signatures also need to stand up to legal scrutiny. Paper-based signatures achieve this on the whole, but apart from the process problems already described, they are arguably much easier to forge.

How many PA’s are pretty good at copying their bosses' signatures (with his or her blessing, of course)? And in the financial services industry, it is suspected that millions of pounds are lost through signature fraud each year. Nor do simple electronic signatures - such as scanned-in bit-map images - make the grade. These are easy to copy and paste and are arguably the least secure type of signature of all.

So what's the solution? An increasing number of construction and engineering firms, including global ones such as Bechtel, Foster Wheeler and Black & Veatch, have adopted digital signatures, a format predicted by industry analysts including Forrester and Gartner to be a growth area in technology over the next few years.

While the idea may seem quite new, there is already a raft of international and national legislation supporting digital signatures, leading to an increasingly large number of companies adopting their use. The fact that an organisation with such rigorous integrity as the European Court of Human Rights uses digital signatures for around half a million letters per year is a pretty good reference for their validity.

DEFINING DIGITAL SIGNATURES
Digital signatures based on internationally accepted PKI standards create legally enforceable, inherently secure records. They are the result of a cryptographic operation using highly secure hardware, creating coded messages that bind the document and the signer and which is unique to both of them, making documents signed with digital signatures completely tamper proof.

Digital signatures work with many document formats and applications, including Word, Excel and PDF, and can be easily validated post-signing using Microsoft Office and any PDF reader. The process is very simple and intuitive, requiring no training or support. Since digital signatures can also be applied using mobile devices, documents can be reviewed and approved from any location - especially important in construction and engineering, where many employees spend much of their time in the field.

Turnaround time for signature-dependent documents is dramatically reduced from days or weeks down to hours or minutes, with significant cost reductions related to printing, filing, faxing, couriering and employee time. AIIM research estimates the return on investment for digital signatures to be typically less than one year.

Digital signatures also streamline business processes, especially when they are integrated with workflow, BPM and ECM solutions such as SharePoint, OpenText and Oracle, as well as with industry-specific solutions including Autodesk's AutoCAD and Bentley's MicroStation. Furthermore, if digital signature solutions are integrated with eDiscovery and records management systems, signed documents become easier to locate - useful for audit trails and compliance requirements.

IMPLEMENTATION
Systems available today span on-premise, cloud and hybrid cloud solutions (with digital signature generated in the cloud, but the document to be signed remains behind the corporate firewall), and implementation is typically straightforward with users up and running within hours.

Updating security systems is a serious business. Before you embark on it, dig out all the information you can. Industry associations are good sources, and here at ARX we have a wide variety of free white papers and ebooks available for download from our website (other vendors have their own information available online as well). However, regardless of which system is chosen, digital signatures have the potential to save construction, engineering and architectural firms time and cost, while improving risk and overall efficiency.
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