The paper contract is coming to an end
In October of 2000, Former President Clinton signed a bill that granted e-signatures the same legal right as the traditional “wet” signatures. By the stroke of one pen, the world of ecommerce changed forever.
Recently, I happened upon a news article that announced that Adobe had acquired EchoSign, a Web-based provider of electronic signature solutions “that don’t require scanning software, signature pads, or digital certificates.” In July last year, Photizo Group was in the first round of investor funding. It just so happened this coincided with my family vacation. The number of pages that were sent to me via email (which had to printed out at a local Staples store) easily exceeded 300. Yours truly had to affix his signature in multiple locations of the contract to satisfy the attorneys for both sides and fax them back to Photizo headquarters.
Not only was this time-consuming, it wasted paper and was expensive. Had we known about EchoSign or DocuSign or RightSignature, this “workflow challenge” would have amounted to an anthill versus a mountain of paper.
The beauty of electronic signatures is the time it saves. Contracts in the traditional process require sales reps, customer reps or service reps to visit clients a few times before a contract is signed. In addition, reps can spend 20 to 25 percent of their time on the road and scanning their contracts into Salesforce.com or another CRM system. In some cases this process can exceed 10 or more days. Using a cloud-based electronic signature solution can drive this process under a day or less.
Adobe’s plan is to integrate EchoSign in their online document exchange services including FormsCentral and CreatePDF. By reducing the time and costs of having documents signed using traditional methods (i.e., fax and overnight envelopes) they hope to take part in a huge revenue opportunity. In 2010, FedEx revenue from overnight envelopes was a whopping $1.64B.
From a managed print standpoint, workflow processes are defined in Stage 3 along with business process improvement. As companies struggle to find efficient solutions to drive out costs, it will be innovative software firms like EchoSign that will rise up and challenge the status quo. The age of the paper contract is now officially drawing to a close and fax will not be far behind.
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