AEC Firms Gain Competitive Advantage with Digital Signatures

The worldwide financial crisis changed the landscape of the engineering industry, and left AEC organizations competing head-to-head for fewer available projects while client demands grow only stricter. With funding for projects greatly minimized, these clients are demanding better quality, faster delivery, and lower costs.

In response to these changing demands, AEC organizations are turning to new technologies for expediting business processes, cutting organizational costs, enhancing collaboration, and ultimately gaining a competitive advantage. Leading AEC organizations have discovered that digital signature technology provides all of these benefits, and more. Now accepted by the vast majority of PE Boards across the US, digital signatures enable these firms to securely and compliantly turn their time-consuming and expensive paper-based approval processes to fast, efficient and fully electronic ones.

Using digital signatures, AEC organizations are able to use their best resources – regardless of their geographic location. This is because, equipped with digital signature capabilities, engineers can add their signatures and professional seals to PDF®, Office®, CAD-based formats including AutoCAD®, and other document or drawing formats in a mere matter of seconds, and deliver this documentation to the receiving party in a matter of minutes, rather than days. This signing capability binds the liability to its source while enhancing the organization’s internal and external collaboration. Further, adopting digital signatures for approval processes significantly reduces the cumbersome and expensive processes of printing, routing, and archiving paper documents. This cuts costs, while increasing employee productivity and organizational efficiency.

Fortunately, with today’s advances in digital signature technology, not only is it available to AEC organizations of all sizes, it’s also easy to integrate with a variety of existing automation or workflow systems, and applications and processes that are already in use. To learn more about how AEC organizations benefit from digital signatures, you can register for a free webinar hosted by Engineering News-Record (ENR) called “Digital Signatures: Designing New Levels of Efficiency and Collaboration”. Guest speakers will include Chris Krafft of Black & Veatch, who will discuss his firm’s use of digital signatures. Other speakers will include the President of the engineering consultancy ZweigWhite, and the CEO of ARX, a leading digital signature solution provider. Free registration for this webinar is available here.

This article is guest contribution by Ashley Miller. Ashley is Digital Signature Specialist at ARX (Algorithmic Research).