After a couple weeks in alpha we're now moving our Service eSignature product into Beta. This project integrates with our service module to electronically sign and store vehicle repair documents. At the right store this allows a service department to dramatically decrease wear and tear on their printers as well as paper consumption.
The system itself is pretty simple to use. Once we've enabled eSignature on a dealers system we enable two more buttons on the Open Order and Order Summary screens. These buttons allow you to take a signature and to display documents associated with a Repair Order.
When the CSR gets a customer to sign off on work (say when writing up the Service Order and printing a Hard Copy) they are shown an electronic copy of the document on their monitor along with a signature window. The CSR shows the work being authorized to the customer and they use the device to "sign" the document.
At this point that document is attached to the corresponding Repair Order. Any time that Repair Order is reviewed the user can press the Documents button to see a list of documents.
Double-clicking any of these items will display the full document and it can either be emailed to the customer or simply printed in the service department.
Technically - our system is based on some fairly simple usb signature capture pads from a company called Topaz Systems - http://www.topazsystems.com/ - we use a wrapper around the Windows RDP Client to allow these client-side USB devices to be used by our server-side apps.
On top of that we need an extremely robust document management infrastructure. It's important to understand that these documents must be stored intact WITH the customer signature - it's illegal to store the signature independant of the document.
All this aside, this application works well. We still expect some changes from our additional Beta sites but it's an exciting project that has some immediate impact for our clients.