San Francisco, California July 11, 2011
In response to the economic downturn and the changing AEC landscape, many of the design firms on the ENR top 500 design firms list are adopting digital signatures as a means for gaining competitive advantage. Digital signatures enable AEC firms to automate approval processes, allowing engineers to easily and securely add their professional seals and graphical signatures to a variety of the most commonly used document types, and deliver signed and sealed electronic documents in a matter of minutes.
With digital signatures, top engineering design firms are succeeding in responding to ever-intensifying client demands for higher quality results at a faster pace and lower costs. Watch a 2-minute video outlining how digital signatures help engineering firms deliver better, faster and cheaper service to their clients.
At Terracon, a leading AEC firm, signers across 100 different offices digitally approved 150,000 reports within five months of implementing digital signatures, resulting in boosted productivity and substantial cost savings through the elimination of paper-based processes (printing, manual stamping and signing, scanning, priority mailing, archiving, etc.), in addition to improved collaboration and client satisfaction.
“Prior to using CoSign, we would need to print out reports, sign them by hand, and then rescan them before we could send them to a client,” said Frank Milano, CIO, Terracon. “That in itself tells you the time that we save signing digitally.”
At Black & Veatch, another leading AEC firm, electrical, civil and structural engineers in the Telecommunications Division have also adopted digital signatures. Digital signatures enable off-site engineers to keep workflows moving forward by allowing them to easily and securely approve documents from any location with an Internet connection.
“We’re producing a lot of deliverables and there is a lot of paperwork moving around. Digital signatures enable our engineers to sign drawings and other documents while traveling or working remotely and keep the workflow going,” said Chris Krafft, Chief Engineer, Telecommunications Division, Black & Veatch.
Legally enforceable and used by professional engineers across the 50 U.S. states, CoSign digital signatures make it easier than ever for AEC firms to compliantly automate paper-based approval processes while optimizing collaboration, enhancing quality, and cutting operational costs. The recently updated CoSign digital signature solution offers enhancements specifically designed for engineering, including multiple-page signing with a simple click-through option, and support for multiple professional seals/stamps per signer. Read more about CoSign version 5.4, or try out the new features and experience the benefits of digital signatures with the free digital signature trial.
