When originally founded in 1839, the company’s main focus was light installations, both residential and public.

Over time, the company developed from a civil, electrical, and industrial engineering business into a multi-technical service business in the areas of communications and energy. 

SPIE Netherlands, which is a subsidiary of the SPIE Group, provides a wide range of services to assist its customers with designing, installing, maintaining and operating their energy networks, facilities, infrastructure and (industrial) buildings.

Following the acquisition of Strukton Worksphere in in January 2022, SPIE Netherlands is now the largest multi-technical service provider in the Netherlands with more than 6,000 employees across 41 locations.

Strukton Worksphere was specialized in managing, maintaining, designing and developing different technical installations in buildings, and has been a pioneer in the market when it comes to data-driven maintenance and digitizing business processes.

They are therefore continuously searching for new ways of creating more efficient and sustainable work processes.

In 2020, the Program Manager for Digitization Sandra Bakker, came to the realization that there could be major efficiency improvement if the document signing process would be fully digitalized. The company therefore started the search for a e-signature provider to initially use for singing external documents, like quotations and purchase agreements.

When Strukton Worksphere merged with the Building Solutions division of SPIE Netherlands in 2022, the entire application landscape of Worksphere was incorporated at SPIE, including ValidSign’s e-signing solution.

Sandra Bakker says “earlier, a quotation was drafted digitally, then by printing, signing and scanning (sometimes crooked), the initial quality was greatly reduced to a point where it could even be hard to read. Additionally, having agreements signed by multiple parties was often a time-consuming process, and where agreements sometimes got lost in the mail. But since the implementation of ValidSign, a quotation can be signed within 1 minute!”

Summary

When implementing ValidSign, SPIE tested the e-signature solution for an entire year before introducing it across departments to sign all kind of documents including,   employment agreements.

“The ValidSign platform is userfriendly and provides better control over document flows. The dashboard shows all outstanding signing requests including their status, this means we must take fewer actions to find out where in the process the document is pending action. You can then easily schedule and send reminders after a few days for the signing process to proceed timely,” says Bakker.

Sign wherever, whenever

In addition to having a great overview of document flows, ValidSign offers the possibility to sign whenever and wherever wanted. “It often happens that, for example, offers have to be amended and signed at the last minute. If this would happen after working hours, or if a signatory is not currently in the office, that is no longer an issue! The required signatory can simply sign the documents at home or from any another location, even on their phone,” says Bakker.

The digital signature solution has enabled agreements to be signed fast and easy as signatories can sign as long as they have internet. This has changed the process significantly, from taking weeks to only days, or even just a few hours.

The future with ValidSign

Digitally signing with ValidSign is now an essential part of SPIE. More than 16 thousand documents are digitally signed severy year and that number is only increasing. “ValidSign is slowly being implemented across the organization. It is currently being investigated at what additional SPIE divisions and departments, the digital signature can be rolled out.

SPIE Netherlands is also expecting to start using the integration between ValidSign and SharePoint Online in order to automatically carry out the last step in the signing process, the filing work,” says Bakker. They believe the integration with SharePoint Online is an important add-on for any organization who wants to set up a fully digital working environment!

Want to know more about how ValidSign’s e-signing solution can be implemented in your organization’s workflow?

Contact our sales department on: sales@validsign.eu/ +31(0)85303 3676 or request a free demo HERE!

Stadgenoot, one of the largest housing corporations in the Netherlands, has implemented the e-signature from ValidSign to streamline the signing process within its organization. This is a major step forward for Stadgenoot in terms of digital transformation and promises to deliver substantial improvements in efficiency and customer experience. In this article, we take a look at the benefits of this new technology and how it is being implemented across the organization.

Stadgenoot is a housing corporation in Amsterdam and rents out more than thirty thousand social rental properties, that has an average rent of 500 euros per month. The housing corporation was formed in July 2008 through a merger between two Amsterdam housing corporations, the General Housing Association (AWV, founded in 1910) and Het Oosten (from 1911).

With more than 300 employees, spread over the four business units, Stadgenoot is an organization of size. Two business units provide financial and public housing management: Finance & Operations and Strategy & Portfolio. The customer-oriented work is housed in the Customer & Home business unit. The real estate-oriented projects are at Real Estate & Development.

Safe signing

Since the beginning of 2020, a large part of the organization has been digitally signing with ValidSign’s cloud based platform. The desire to make the switch over to an e-signature was fueled by the possibility to guarantee the security around the signing process and personal data seamlessly, as the manual signature wasn’t able to offer this guarantee at all times.

After Stadgenoot had made the decision to implement the e-signature, they were referred to ValidSign through their ERP system supplier Aareon. They scheduled a demo with ValidSign to have a tour of the signing platform and to discuss the possibilities for implementing it in their workflow. Ibrahim Hassan, functional administrator at Stadgenoot mentions, “Finding a digital signature supplier is quite easy, but you rarely find a supplier who also identifies as a partner and always thinks along with the customer. We found this in ValidSign.”

Except from two departments, ValidSign’s e-signature has now been rolled out across the organization. These two departments are currently using an e-signature platform from another supplier, but will soon make the transition over to ValidSign.

By using an e-signature, each department provides the highest level of security for the signing of their documents, and at the same time they have full insight into the signing process through the platform’s dashboard. The organization has chosen to identify signers through a second-factor authentication, this SMS authentication feature ensures that in addition to the regular email verification, the signer’s phone number is also verified to make sure it’s the correct person signing.

Then the iDIN authentication is being used by tenants for when signing the leases etc.

Most of the departments uses the platform for signing forms, assignments and/or contracts by external parties, while the finance department signs internal payment orders.

Sign anywhere and at any time

Because of the COVID pandemic, and the new way of working, there is an increased need for the digital way of signing. Ibrahim says: “Like the rest of the Netherlands, in the beginning of 2020 everything changed abruptly when we were only allowed to work from home. Getting an a signature from your manager or director was then a tricky task, and we were forced to rethink the processes. For example, the signatories were not present on location or did not have their own printer at home. ValidSign now allows us to sign, whenever, wherever!”.

Increased efficiency

In addition to the fact that the e-signing solution guarantees a high level of document security, the process has also become more efficient. “The time it takes to receive a signed document has been significantly reduced because a number of actions no longer need to be carried out. The volume of paperwork has also been drastically and employees have more time to spend on other important tasks. The users within Stadgenoot are satisfied with the new way of signing, and they were able to get started working with the platform after an initial introduction, which was nicely organized by ValidSign.

About the future

Within now and a few weeks, we expect the two departments that aren’t currently using the ValidSign platform to make the transition and then even more documents will be digitally signed. In addition, ValidSign and Aereon are developing the integration between the ERP system Tobias AX and ValidSign so that Stadgenoot and other companies can start signing from the trusted ERP system.

Once the integration has been implemented, several departments will be using it. Ibrahim says: “The e-signature is an indispensable part in our processes, and the use of it will only increase in the coming years. That is also why we like to work with ValidSign and Aareon to make the integration even more future-proof. We like to invest time and effort in this, because we believe that we will get a lot in return”.

Want to know more about how ValidSign’s e-signing solution can be implemented in your organization’s workflow?

Contact our sales department on: sales@validsign.eu/ +31(0)85303 3676 or request a free demo HERE!