Investing in document signature solutions

Large and small organizations alike have found that requiring 'wet ink' signatures means that the investments they have made in document and workflow automation do not enable them to establish fully paperless processes. In order to collect signatures they must revert back to printing paper documents that must be physically signed, scanned, archived and routed, not to mention that the resulting files sometimes get lost. This bottleneck brings efficient business processes to a grinding halt while increasing operating costs.

To address this issue, more and more companies are implementing digital signature solutions, which allow the organization to maintain a completely electronic workflow from document creation through to its signing, archiving and auditing. These solutions ensure that the company no longer has to interrupt its streamlined electronic processes by reintroducing paper into the Workflow.

The purpose of this white paper is to help you establish the Return on Investment (ROI) that your organization can expect to achieve by deploying a digital signature solution. In order to quantify the costs of using paper-based signatures we use an example of a company with 200 employees who sign documents as a part of the organization’s operating policies and procedures. We then calculated The ROI and payback period by adding on the costs of implementing a digital signature solution. This paper concludes with a chart summarizing the figures you need in order to calculate your own ROI.

As mentioned above, we will examine a company with 200 employees who each sign 250 documents per year (an average of 1 document per working day) as part of their operating policies and procedures. 

The next step in calculating the ROI of a digital signature solution is to arrive at the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) required to deploy and maintain the solution. The TCO is based on a number of factors including the cost of the initial system, the cost of the internal IT resources (or external professional services) for deployment, the annual vendor maintenance and support fees, and the annual internal IT maintenance cost, as well as any additional costs that are directly related to the digital signature solution.