Paperless Transformation of Cement Company using emSigner

eMudhra helps Cement Company go paperless by managing and streamlining critical processes with ease

Overview

The Cement industry is heavily dependent on suppliers, distributors, and retailers. Process automation is mostly limited to machines, and there is still a heavy reliance on paper-based methods, which causes significant time delays in contract closures.

The company wanted to automate most of the above functions to reduce turnaround time and reduce rework by making use of re-usable templates eMudhra outlined the following key areas where emSigner combined with Digital Signatures would significantly improve and streamline the documentation process of the company and save huge costs.

• Signing documents like Purchase Orders, Invoices, RPF/RFQ, Tenders, Contracts etc. as well as efficient reminding of the same via email or SMS
• Get vendors on board with a simple and intuitive workflow-based solution
• Get multiple approval using parallel or sequential signing, based on user role in the organization
• embedding emSigner into the Organization’s existing inventory management forms and processes, saving time, reducing errors and increasing visibility

Business Matters

India’s one of the biggest manufacturers and exporter of cement-based out of Mumbai goes entirely paperless by using emSigner’s workflow and Digital Signature capabilities to generate and sign invoices, PO, RFQ and tenders in no time and integrate it with existing systems.

Business Needs

In today’s competitive environment, relying on outdated paper processes can be fatal. Existing processes are not only time-consuming but also error-prone. The need of the hour is to go digital so that movements of documents take place within or outside the company in a paperless manner.

Approach

Deploy an integrated solution to digitally sign and encrypt documents that are legally binding and guarantee the authenticity, integrity, and confidentiality of data.

The department should be able to use emSigner Multi-party physical signatures and real-time signing of documents related to invoice processing, regulatory compliance, and audit sign off, expense reporting, and inventory sign off. In a phased manner, the organization would integrate all its internal as well as external applications with emSigner to facilitate the signing of approximately 10,000 invoices per month, 500 Proposals, and Contracts & 50,000 other documents.

Digital Signature Technology

The Digital Signature Technology works on the Public Key Infrastructure framework, which uses a Cryptographic Key Pair – Private and Public Key, for secure access and transmission of information.

Digital Signatures is generated by the issuer for the client in a secure device.

Benefits

The Cement Company reaped significant benefits by implementing digital signature-based workflow signing. This includes:

• Access all Master Service Agreements anywhere, anytime
• Reduce procure to pay cycle time
• Better compliance as a result of complete traceability of documents for audit purpose
• Tracking real-time signature progress on documents initiated for signing
• Importing files from multiple clouds and file storage services like Dropbox, Google drive into emSigner
• Faster turnaround time, increased employee efficiency, productivity and transparency
• Online and Offline signing Capabilities

Solution

eMudhra implemented emSigner – Secure Paperless Office solution to enable Digital Signature based approvals for the following workflows

• External flows for Vendor Onboarding and Vendor Payments
• Internal flows between Departments and Finance
• Bulk signing of documents for sending proposals to vendors

emSigner was integrated with the ERP application over Webservices API for digital signing of documents.

Deployment was done on-premise which allowed the company a higher degree of control and customization, allowed the company to retain data on-premise for confidentiality purposes.

• For individual signing, individual digital signature certificates were issued to Authorized Signatories
• For Bulk Signing, Class 3 Document Signer Certificate was used which gives a higher risk assurance to depending parties for a critical use case such as Invoice Signing
• From a security and risk standpoint, a Hardware Security Module was used to store the Class 3 Document Signer certificate

The paperless office solution uses following broad modules:

           emSigner:

• On-premise Digital Signature enabled workflow management solution used for defining paperless workflows
  
  Hardware Security Module
• Protect the cryptographic infrastructure of some of the most security-conscious organizations in the world by securely managing, processing, and storing cryptographic keys inside a hardened, tamper-resistant device
  
  Class 3 Document Signer Certificate 
  
• To sign critical documents such as invoices
  
  SecurePass
• eMudhra authentication server which was used to automatically validate the signed documents that were received by the organization