We really enjoyed the piece at Because I Write, "EchoSign is Paperless Solution", which highlights a subtle but powerful part of EchoSign. The point of the post is that while the small number of very "important" contracts and documents at his company did get scanned in manually and made "digital" (often after being faxed back in the first place), the effort involved is so high to scan, tag, and input, that it can't practical be done for the far higher volume of 'mundane' documents that make up everyday business (here, 100,000+ documents).
The author notes that if all these contracts and documents had just been signed through EchoSign, they would have automatically been turned into digital PDFs, and routed to all parties that needed a digital copy:
"The initial idea of helping people to organize agreement, signing and exchange of documents is great . . . [But EchoSign's] solution is far bigger than just managing agreement and signing online. It could be a complete paperless solution.
In my little project ... we had to scan all the backlog and put them in one of our PC on the intranet. Due the size of the backlog we were only able to digitize important contractual documents, a small percentage of the whole lot….I’m talking about few full container load of pure papers. Incidentially we just cleared our site offices so we know the size of the forrest we have killed.
I’m talking about more than 100,000 records in our database, each record could be few pages of a letter or 50 pages of technical submissions full of calculations and drawings etc.
Going back in time we have duplicated our effort, i.e. we faxed the papers but had to scan them afterwards. If EchoSign was there 4 years ago we would have used their fax server as a node for the entire project, i.e. everyone faxes papers there and EchoSign manages the routing and distribution to the order of the sender."
EchoSign: send us your mundane, your boring, your routine contracts and agreements. That's the beauty of combining an incredibly easy to use product with an all-you-can-eat model (and for EchoSign Free, free): just use us for everything.
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