A Large Steel Manufacturing Company in India Reduces Vendor Onboarding from 25 Days to Hours with eMudhra emSigner

Client Overview

A Large Steel Manufacturing Company in India is one of the world's largest steel producers, with annual crude steel deliveries in the tens of millions of tonnes and operations across multiple countries. The company manages a complex, supplier-intensive ecosystem involving hundreds of vendors, distributors, and raw material suppliers — making vendor onboarding, procurement documentation, and accounts payable some of the most operationally significant document workflows in the business. With a large Procurement Department managing custom proposals, contracts, purchase orders, and invoices across multiple locations, the inefficiency of paper-based document signing directly affected supply chain performance and vendor relationships.

The Challenge

Vendor onboarding was one of the most cumbersome processes in the organisation's procurement operations. The Procurement Department was required to create multiple custom proposals per vendor partner, using standard office applications. Proposals were then printed, manually signed, and couriered to vendors — introducing delays of 20 to 25 days for each onboarding cycle. Inbound vendor documentation — including income statements, information security compliance records, and tax compliance certificates — was manually received from multiple locations and verified at the headquarters, further extending the process.

Vendor payment cycles were equally affected: invoices were manually received from locations, physically approved by location managers, and then processed by the finance team — a sequential, paper-dependent workflow that delayed accounts payable and strained vendor relationships. The organisation required a solution that could digitise the entire vendor onboarding and payment workflow, integrate with existing ERP, CRM, and supply chain management systems, support bulk signing for high-volume use cases, and provide automatic verification of incoming vendor-signed documents — all while retaining data on-premises for confidentiality.

“Onboarding a vendor took 20 to 25 days because every document had to be printed, signed, and couriered. In a business where vendor relationships are foundational to our supply chain, that delay was unacceptable. We needed digital signing that was immediate, verifiable, and integrated into the systems our teams already use every day. — Vice President, Procurement Operations”

The Solution

eMudhra implemented emSigner as the organisation's enterprise paperless office solution, deployed on-premises to ensure full data control and confidentiality. The solution was integrated with the organisation's ERP, CRM, and supply chain management systems via web services APIs, enabling digital signing of documents directly within existing workflows without requiring any changes to core operational systems.

Individual digital signature certificates were issued to authorised signatories for individual signing use cases. For bulk signing of high-volume documents such as invoices, a Class 3 Document Signer Certificate was deployed, providing the higher risk assurance required for critical financial document use cases. The signing infrastructure was secured by a Hardware Security Module (HSM) for cryptographic key protection. eMudhra's SecurePass authentication server was additionally deployed to automatically validate all incoming vendor-signed documents in real time, enabling the Corporate Office to verify document authenticity immediately upon receipt.

The solution covered three primary workflow categories: external flows for vendor onboarding and vendor payments, enabling vendors to submit digitally signed documents directly; internal flows between departments and finance for procurement approvals; and bulk signing of proposals and contracts for mass distribution to the vendor network. The phased integration approach progressively extended emSigner across all relevant internal and external applications, ultimately enabling the signing of invoices, proposals, contracts, and all other procurement documentation at full enterprise scale.

Results

The deployment of emSigner delivered one of the most significant operational transformations in the organisation's procurement history — reducing vendor onboarding from 25 days to hours, automating accounts payable, and establishing a legally non-repudiable, fully auditable document chain across the entire vendor ecosystem.