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What is your recommendation to get customer sign-off on electronic documents? Typically I have some Word documents (forms) I need to get signed-off by the customer. How would you recommend to do that? Just an email reply mentioning the OK? or customer typing inside the document with the Microsoft Word "Track changes" option on? |
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First of all, if you use Microsoft Office Word, you can use digital signatures features. You would first put your digital signature, email document to a customer, your customer puts their digital signature and emails a copy of the document back to you. This is as good as signing on paper. Follow the link below for a step by step guide how to do this in Office 2003 and Office 2007: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=79d06e72-4b45-4669-9eac-0eca5821e8ff&displaylang=en If you cannot use digital signatures in Word, then there are two ways in my mind. If this is a high business impact document (contract, statement of work, payment bill), I would still use the standard old way when my customer prints the electronic version, signs it, scans it and emails back to me. Check with your legal department on that. For low business impact documents (specifications, plan of actions, etc), I usually have two parts of my document that I use for that: a) An OARP table on the first page. I identify all approvers and put "Signed Off Date" column to track a date when an approver signs off on the document. b) A table to track changes and major events at the end of the document. If we signs off, I will add a row with date, description ( signed off in a meeting on in ) and a name. And I save a copy of an email or meeting notes in the same documentation repository as where the document is. |
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The company I currently work for does it via either attaching the e-mail or referencing it. Are you storing your documents in an electronic document repository? As in that case you can store the e-mail alongside the document for future reference. I think the track changes mode is not the optimal solution but I guess that is more of a personal thing if you like to constantly have those "unaccepted changes" lingering around in your document ... Just my two pence :-) |
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My vote goes for having an APPROVED BY table in a document. Just collect approvals by email and modify the document yourself. That way you don't have to organize a chain of emails to pass a document around. If your document repository allows, approvers could modify the document themselves, or a link to the related email is a good idea. If not, at least keep the emails in an archive for audit purposes. A lot of the time the actual approvals are not as important of the audit trail of related emails. That archive of threads would be a distraction from the document's content. Although I hate it, I've frequently seen required approvers just too busy to formally deal with the process. In those cases you have to make sure you have a record of "please reply with your approval" requests to explain that empty row in the APPROVED BY table. |
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We use Approve It which embeds an image of your signature (password protected) into a document. But, it requires installing more software. We also use email and attach it to online documentation. |
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