Stephen Walker is a new addition to our sales and marketing team and recently went through the onboarding process.  This process inspired his first blog post below.  Welcome, Steve! 

Author:  Stephen Walker
eOriginal Sales and Marketing Manager

If your organization is like most around the country, your new hire “onboarding” process is difficult, cumbersome, and un-friendly to the environment. The average company has many forms that the new hire must read and sign prior to appearing for their first day of work. Included among these are the various federal and state forms that are required, such as the Form I-9 & W4 withholding form. These forms and policies, when coupled with your required corporate forms can present a tremendous challenge and a real waste of training time for your new employee. In addition, the amount of paper generated and stored from multiple employee hirings in any given year is tremendous and does have a cumulative negative effect on the environment and to the conservation of resources.

Fortunately, technology has provided a solution, electronic signatures and eVaulting. Imagine how much wasted time and effort could be recovered by sending your new hire an employment packet via a secure email link delivered from your own web site. The soon to be employee logs onto your site through a secure link and enters a password that has been provided to him or her prior to signing on. The prospective employee can review and sign all required policies and forms with an electronic signature. The forms can then be digitally signed and housed in a secure tamper proof electronic vault where their audit history can be verified if ever needed for purposes of non-repudiation. The ability to sign documents electronically and securely store them can help human resources professionals take advantage of technology to vastly increase onboarding productivity and thus better assist their organization in automating the onboarding process. There are several ways in which electronic onboarding can assist in the process for bringing New hires aboard but one of the most important is corporate socialization of the new employee.

The vast majority of company web sites provide only general information to prospective employees, such as mailing address and telephone numbers for the main reception desk or human resources department. They are not yet tailored to provide a new hire with specific information pertaining to their new role in your organization. End to End electronic signature and vaulting solution providers such as eOriginal provide both the HR professional and the new hire with the ability to electronically sign and securely store as many documents as needed to comply with corporate governance and regulatory demands. The new hire has the ability to print or download watermarked copies of his or her offer letter, employment agreement, non-compete or NDA or any other pertinent documents and the Human Resource professional and the company have secure, digitally signed and wrapped documents that can stand up to authenticity challenges. The documents remain under the control of the company and can be destroyed if needed through a certified process that is audit trail verified. Electronic delivery and signing of these materials are much more effective than paper and can often replace most or all of the need to send post office mail or over-nighted forms. Documents that don’t necessarily need to be signed but do require an acknowledgement of receipt or agreement to uphold such as a corporate handbook or guidebook can be set up for that as well.

Automated & electronic onboarding can save your organization a great deal of time & money as well as providing a secure, enforceable legally compliant process. It is also a great way for Human Resources departments to participate in your company’s green initiative.

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I am always on the look out for new technologies, applications, or tools that help to make life a little easier.   As a software company we really appreciate the effort and thought that goes into creating a new application, a widget or just updating existing tools.  So, when social media mogul Chris Brogan featured Dunkin Run, a cool iPhone app, created by Dunkin Donuts, I got to thinking about similar tools we provide that are simple, useful, and helpful to our customers.   

In addition to designing our electronic signature solutions to be some of the most user-friendly and easy to implement tools in our industry, we have another tool we often use but rarely highlight… the eOriginal ROI Analysis Calculator.  eOriginal’s ROI Calculator simply factors in the most common variables associated with physically managing, shipping, scanning and storing paper documents while providing you with an estimate of the cost savings your company can expect to receive through implementing an electronic signature solution.  

It is simple in design so the entire process is straightforward and only takes a few minutes to complete.  It is easy to use; all we have to do is plug in the numbers relative to your specific company and business practices.  Finally, it is helpful in providing a more insightful picture of the benefits associated with implementing electronic signatures and instrumental in building and supporting your argument for the transition to a paperless environment.  For more information or a customized analysis, please contact me by email spalubinsky@eoriginal.com.

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eCore®…Looking Forward

As summer is upon us, we look forward to baseball games and barbeques and working through our product enhancement projects in anxious anticipation of the days ahead…and so the story of the 2009 eOriginal product roadmap continues….

This year, we are looking to improve a few of our internal processes to better enable quality support and quick product delivery.  Our efforts will offer our current and future customers shorter implementation cycles and greater product capability and flexibility. 

Early releases this year have already:

• Introduced an out-of-the-box signing experience, eOriginal SmartSign® Web, making custom-branded eSignature solutions available without IT resource involvement.
• Enabled signed packages to be prepared, reviewed, signed, and managed through a zero-footprint, zero-implementation web service.  Simply upload your documents and configure your signing scenario and you are on your way to having completely and accurately signed documents as quickly as your signers can access them. 
• Refreshed the Command Center™ user experience, providing improved ease-of-use and greater flexibility in transaction and document management. 
• Improved searching capabilities, in-line document access, and the ability to act upon multiple transactions or documents with a single action. This allows document managers to more readily identify and maintain the contents of their secure repository.

 Among our targeted efforts for the remainder of the year are:

• Continuing our refresh of the Command Center^TM user experience, providing improved ease-of-use and greater flexibility in transaction and document management.
• Enhancing our out-of-the-box signing experience, simplifying the package creation and offering new package management capabilities.
• Improving our PDF-processing abilities, offering enhanced electronic signature capabilities and providing support for new PDF features and specifications.
• Introducing a complete set of web services, enabling rapid integration of full eCore feature-set capabilities and simplifying integrated application deployments.
• Streamlining our internal processing, improving performance and facilitating our ability to rapidly deliver feature enhancements.
• Leveraging new infrastructure technologies, allowing our customers to take advantage of capabilities offered by the newer infrastructure versions.

‘Simplify, simplify, simplify!’ is our motto for 2009.  Everyone is looking to do more with less.  Our goal is to deliver our eCore®, eCore® On Demand, and eOriginal SmartSign® Web products as tools that will enable you to do so.  Whether you are new to electronic signing or a seasoned veteran, eOriginal® aims to make, and keep, your path to electronic signing success simple.

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