Nine years ago, Mariagerfjord Municipality had 150 employees with employee signatures – today they have eight times as many, around 1200. But the administrative burden is minimal and new employee signatures can be issued and ready for use within about three seconds – thanks to SmartSignatur.
Without SmartSignatur..
Without SmartSignatur, Chris Antonsen would probably be thinking about quitting his job, he says cheerfully. He is responsible for employee signatures in Mariagerfjord municipalities. And employee signatures can require a lot of manual administrative work when they need to be set up – or renewed every three years.
– Without SmartSignatur, every employee would have to write an email to me first. Then I would need to get the employee’s CPR number and full name, and manually enter that into our ordering system. Then the employee would have to wait eight to ten days in order to get a letter that would first be sent to the municipality and later distributed to them via internal post. And if the letter disappeared in the mail, I would need to order a new employee signature to them, and they’d have to wait another eight to ten days – and during that waiting period, they wouldn’t be able to get access to the IT systems they needed to do their work.
Ordering in sixty seconds
But luckily for Antonsen’s work satisfaction and his employee efficiency, the SmartSignatur system looks entirely different:
“The whole thing can be done in about sixty seconds. The employee goes into the self-service portal and orders. I approve the order, and the employee gets a link right away to activate his or her signature. The employee clicks on the link and they are ready to go. Right away. And if a new employee is hired in an area with a job profile that requires an employee signature, the request for an employee signature takes place automatically,” says Antonsen.
This simple process was a big relief when 300 nurses and health aids renewed their employee signatures as part of the introduction of a common pharmaceutical card. And Antonsen is happy about the fact that when those 300 signatures need to be renewed in three years, all but the legally mandated user name will be changed automatically.
“One thing is the administrative time I save. But the best thing is that employees don’t have to wait for days or weeks to get access to the IT systems they need to do their work,” he says.
Competitive price
Mariagerfjord Municipality has had SmartSignatur ever since 2007. Why has the municipality stuck with it for so long?
“First of all, I can see that it is cheaper than competing solutions. And it’s become an integrated part of our identity management system. For example, we have an almost automatic user set-up, where the system creates a request for an employee signature if it is relevant for the job profile or work area,” says Antonsen.
The whole thing can be done in about sixty seconds. The employee goes into the self-service portal and orders. I approve the order, and the employee gets a link right away to activate his or her signature. The employee clicks on the link and they are ready to go. Right away.
Employee signature with flexibility in the system
SmartSignatur offers excellent flexibility for employees in their work. Health aides have tablets that use it – and when they arrive at work, they can just take whatever machine is available.
“We save the signatures centrally, not just on a single machine. That means that you can work on whatever machine you choose, and the signature follows along with you. And if your laptop isn’t working, you can use whatever workstation you like. You always have access to the relevant professional system, no matter where you are geographically or what machine you’re sitting at,” says Antonsen.
IT Audit likes Traceability and Transparency
As a side benefit of SmartSignatur, the municipality achieves tracking and transparency, says Antonsen. “At any time, I can document who ordered a signature, who approved it – usually me – and what it was used for. Our IT auditing likes that.”
“If I wanted that kind of transparency and traceability in the old system, I would have had to sit and manually document who had ordered the signature. But the system takes care of this automatically. So in that way I save time, but I also have a higher level of security.”