The case study covers one of our solution implementations for our large agro-based client with over INR 3000 crores in revenue headquartered in North India. Client is using S/4 HANA SAP ERP and have over 8 plants in India.
Signing documents is a time-taking & unprotected activity
Hundreds of documents are being posted by our client in SAP ERP like sales invoices, purchase orders, contracts, packing lists, etc. Our client was signing these documents after printing them from SAP ERP either manually or by using USB token based digital signature. Both these ways of signing the documents are a time-consuming activity & is person dependent. Digital signing the documents through USB tokens or through external application is not very efficient as it requires manual intervention. This was leading to an unnecessary effort by our client which can be easily solved through automation. Due to their data security policies, our client was also not comfortable to use API driven or remote digital signing process to achieve the required automation.
SAP hosted Digital Signature Cockpit Solution
We presented our client with SAP ERP hosted Digital Signature solution to fully automate document signing & to implement the entire solution in their SAP landscape itself. Our SAP based Digital Signature cockpit solution can be configured to sign all types of documents posted in the SAP ERP. We requested our client to provide us list of document types & output types which require automated digital signing. Our cockpit screen provides an option to the user to sign the posted documents in the SAP ERP in bulk. User can also digitally sign the document automatically upon printing of the document in the SAP ERP.
We requested our client to provide us with a Digital Signature Certificate (PFX file) which will be used for signing the documents. The digital signature certificate is easily available from any listed Certificate Authorities (CAs) in India. We host the digital signature certificate in the SAP ERP itself so that no part of the solution requires any additional infrastructure or any integration with outside system is needed. We also provided a configuration screen to our client to authorize users who would be able to raise request for digitally signing the documents, our cockpit solution also maintains a detailed audit trail of user actions. The digitally signed documents can also be sent to required stakeholders via email communication and can also be archived in the SAP DMS or local folders. We also implemented SAP DMS solution for our client along with Digital Signature cockpit solution.
Time cost saving & better security
Client does not have to any longer depend on digitally signing the documents manually by USB tokens. Our SAP hosted Digital signature cockpit solution saves over 40-50 hours every month for our client in document processing. It has led to lot of ancillary benefits in their supply chain & procurement process as well.