Future-Ready Procurement with an Electronic Signature Solution

Many industry professionals predict that successful businesses will become digital for the future transactions. The challenge is actually the way to go digital in a correct and effective way. Today, procurement experts are leveraging modern technology like never before, cloud-based electronic signature solutions for acquiring financial effectiveness, secure the best products and services, plus boost supplier relationships.

Modern eSignature software makes document sharing, signing, and approvals a simple and seamless experience. These solutions have proven to be extremely efficient in multiple areas, such as procurement, sales, streamlining tasks, and categorizing the supply chain effectively, while saving staff members time and effort.

Several established enterprises and entrepreneurs have recognized that paper-intensive procurement processes in the past have outlived the overall usefulness. However, now some best practices within procurement mainly focus on reducing risks, maintaining compliance via digital platforms, and maximizing efficiency.

Traditional Signing Procedure

A conventional approach to acquiring signatures on various contracts can be daunting for companies. Does this sound familiar to you? You generate procurement contracts, iron out negotiations, send them for approval and signatures, and keep waiting. On the other hand, you could send out a contract for third-party signatures and lose track of who has signed the document, who hasn’t, when it was sent or received, any delays related to contract execution, and so much more.

Signatures are the most critical aspect of the contract management process. But traditional signing methods are slow, clunky, and tedious. Wet-ink signatures do not offer a streamlined experience for external/internal parties. The direct and indirect expenses of paper-intensive methods, time, and mailing costs can become inflated. Ultimately, traditional signing methods put the business at risk of causing the firm to be viewed negatively for not providing a streamlined signing method.

Contracts that are built around outdated methods require printing, faxing, mailing, scanning and consistent follow ups delay the contract execution. When businesses wait for long periods for contracts to be signed and returned, they put suppliers and clients/partners in difficult position to complete the entire process of document management.

Here we present the most critical ways that your procurement team members can make progress in digital transformation.

1. Search for a Paperless Option for Your Daily Activities

The procurement department, which acquired the best digital effectiveness, started their path by taking small initiatives. A great place to begin is to map the contract touch-points in order to establish which activities would be beneficial from digital transactions. It’s been observed that procurement experts recognize common ways in which the team members are minimizing the pen and paper-based methods, using eSignatures and cloud-based document management systems.

2. Focus on Robust Supplier Relationships

The procurement department is tasked with sourcing several products/services. Working closely with multiple vendors and clients while negotiating price, contract execution, and handling regular interactions with vendors needs greater levels of control.

Embracing an electronic signature system allows your team to respond quickly during critical negotiations and overall provides granular insight into document execution. Optimized approvals are crucial to handling the ongoing flow of contracts inherent in vendor relationships. Such effectiveness can result in substantial enhancements to the bottom line. It has been observed that the digitally mature organizations enjoy around 15% more revenue and 55% more profit than the other companies lagging in adoption of digital workflows.

3. Include Team Members in Identifying Pain Points

Today’s productivity demands tight deadlines, which are the key source of daily stress for employees. Forbes stated, one of the major ways to boost staff engagement is by eliminating wasted and valuable time. By reducing tedious paperwork from activities, your team members can spend more hours on value-added tasks, such as driving cost savings, boosting services, and combating any supply chain risks.

While talking with your teammates, you can simply recognize these time-consuming activities, which can be enhanced via digital technology, like eSignatures. By utilizing easy calculations of the time saved per task multiplied against an average hourly rate, you can prioritize the best effectiveness and money-saving opportunities.

4. Completely Embrace Mobile Workflows and Technologies

Quick reaction times are critical for high-service contracts. It’s been observed that the challenges procurement leaders face today the service expectations along with technological competence of vendors is rapidly increasing. A mobile-based process is crucial to aiding the agility of departments. Procurement professionals require global equipment and local departments with the end-to-end mobile capabilities to aid in the improvement of responsiveness to customers. Completing contracts from any smart device anywhere in the world aids to ensure that your team members can remain on top of all opportunities as the business evolves.

5. Compliance with Regulations

The Chief Procurement Officer (CFO) faces a complicated landscape dominated by regulatory/legal problems, which can affect your businesses bottom line and overall brand reputation. Adopting eSignature technology can aid you in boosting effective insight into workflows and ensures compliance throughout all business purchasing polices.

Gaining access to audit logs, which capture time, date, and authentication processes used for signatures helps in validating legal and executions of compliance and handle complete archival access. The best digital technologies allow you to implement dynamic demands and policies of the worldwide regulators by establishing documented corporate methods.

6. Geographical Locations and Regulations

In today’s economy, suppliers and clients are located all around the world. This generates many challenges in contract execution due strict international and national security laws/standards. You must be definite that the signature methods being used are legally-binding, plus comply with laws like UETA, ESIGN Act, and more.

Moreover, you must understand that an eSignature solution provides compliance with these privacy regulations and the mandatory security standards. It’s crucial for teams to align with supplier methods and new technologies. For this reason, eSign is rapidly becoming a standard in business transactions. Leveraging this software can aid your enterprise more efficiently than ever before.

7. Understand Best Practices for Client Services

The daily transactional experiences in our lives, such as online shopping and communication are setting up a bar for opportunities in the specialized services within the organization. Modern trends for customers, which are fueling digitization, involve boosting the prevalence of mobile-based technologies. This in turn demands quick access to needed details, and much more. Check out new ways in order to mimic customer services best practices within supplier transactions. For instance, minimizing the total number of clicks needed to store and sign contracts, plus offering automated progress tracking will reflect in client-friendly aspects of e-commerce.

8. Cooperation between Finance, Legal, and IT Department

Modern applications that optimize procurement methods must also streamline the existing solution investments. It’s crucial to work with the IT department in order to integrate effective modern tools. Plus, you must also consult with the AP and finance departments, ensuring that the new technology fits with all the teams’ various requirements. The procurement contracts routinely consist of highly sensitive details. Discussing new processes with the legal department is the best way to validate any solutions compatibility and assure safe transmission of sensitive agreements and data.

9. Saving Time and Expenses

An employee who is working in the procurement department knows the importance of ROI. It may cost extra dollars in order to process each contract managed via a paper-intensive transaction system. A busy procurement leader will struggle with massive numbers of proposal requests. Each one with individual timelines needs the ability to continuously shift priorities. This procedure basically comes with several discussion rounds, iterations, and negotiation tactics.

In procurement and other areas of business, time is money. Hence, waiting for signatures to be completed on procurement documents could lead to lengthy delays. An eSignature software solution streamlines the entire approval and signature workflow by minimizing the number of variables needed in order to track procurement equations. Activities which may have taken several weeks once to execute can now be concluded within only a few minutes.

An Online eSignature software helps organization obtain all mandatory signatures from suppliers, customers, and partners all over the world using multiple communication devices. Employees save more time as they no longer need to locate and match paper receipts with the deliveries via complicated lists and various emails.

Supply chain professionals and other corporate leaders point out that the quantity of PO completions by staff enhances significantly after introducing a procurement automation solution. Vendor lead times and PO cycles minimize to the equal quantity. Visibility and document sharing among the stakeholders evolve into procedures which are widely responsible for the overall positive transformation.

To Sum Up

Electronic signatures make your workplace paperless and protect sensitive contracts as they are all stored in a digital format. Various authentication processes makes the system safer and more secure. Authorizing a signer’s identity eSignature solutions help to safeguard your business against any kind of forgery.

Plus, detailed audit logs ensure non-repudiation in the court of law. Thus, there is always a reason for the procurement experts to switch to an effective and useful eSignature solutions.