5 Ways Next-Generation Technologies Transform Your Agreement Process

The traditional ways in which teams create, commit to, and manage agreements are full of gaps. They involve too many technology systems, too many steps, and clunky manual handoffs as employees move documents and data from one tool to another. We’ve talked to organizations about their agreement processes and found that they are difficult, costly, and inefficient. We call this set of problems the Agreement Trap. Including lost revenue and value destruction, it costs organizations around the world almost $2 trillion a year.

Intelligent agreement management with Docusign IAM is the next generation of agreement technology, built specifically to help teams escape the Agreement Trap. It removes the manual steps and disconnected systems of the traditional agreement workflow and replaces them with a seamless platform that helps increase efficiency. 

Here are five ways Docusign IAM can help your teams customize agreement workflows and improve the end-to-end agreement process.

Find agreements and language with AI

One of the most common problems resulting from outdated agreement workflows is the inability to find a contract or pinpoint specific language. Docusign and Deloitte research on the end-to-end agreement process found that almost half of companies believe they spend too much time searching for agreements. Over 54% lack the tools to automate the tracking and analysis of their completed agreements. All that time spent searching is frustrating and costly.

Docusign Navigator is a powerful repository that uses AI to help you quickly answer agreement questions. It offers simple filters that can instantly sort your catalog by party, appreciation date, dollar value, and more. Navigator also includes a search bar that uses natural language processing tools to search at the conceptual level rather than just the keyword level. That can be particularly useful when searching for language about complex ideas like privacy or force majeure. Generative AI functionality can even create summaries of long or complex agreement portions of agreement language.

Make better decisions with agreement reporting

Your agreements might look like pages of plain text, but Docusign IAM turns them into structured collections of data. By extracting key data points, your team can get a quick snapshot of any individual document or the agreement library as a whole. Those data points can be used to quickly and accurately answer critical business questions.

For example, if you’re looking to identify the customers who spend the most with your organization, reporting in Docusign IAM can answer that. It can also tell you which expiring agreements are set to auto-renew. Your team can use reporting functionality to track regular statistics about your agreements and use that robust data to make more informed decisions about the direction of the company.

Connect tools using integrations

Another resounding takeaway from Deloitte and Docusign research is that teams are wasting resources moving information around among too many disjointed tools, causing problems with both version control and data sharing. 

Instead of a string of attaching, uploading, and reformatting, and reuploading, what if an agreement lived on the same platform from creation all the way through negotiation, signature, execution, and renewal? Docusign IAM customers can access the Docusign App Center to connect all of the tools they currently use to create, commit to, and manage agreements.

Remove manual steps with workflow automation

Integrations minimize the work involved in moving agreement information from one tool to another. Automation takes that improvement to the next level by eliminating manual effort that advances agreements from one step in the workflow to the next. Removing all those manual handoffs saves time, reduces errors, and gives everyone better visibility into the agreement process.

Docusign Maestro is a no-code solution to those costly and painful steps. IAM customers can use Maestro to design a standard agreement workflow, including steps like identity verification and electronic signature, and set conditions for completion at each step. As soon as one step is finished, Maestro kicks off the next one. Individuals who need to be notified will automatically receive alerts. Any capabilities that need to be used at the next step (e.g., eSignature, ID Verification, Notary, etc.) will automatically connect to the process. Once the process is mapped out in Maestro, agreements will move from end to end as seamlessly as possible.

Simplify collaboration on agreements

When agreements involve additional parties and organizations, the workflow can easily become bogged down with problems resulting from poor visibility and version control. It’s easy to lose track of which version of an agreement is current, which party is reviewing that version, which suggested revisions have been accounted for, and who is responsible for taking action next.

Docusign IAM solves that problem with a single cloud-based version of a document that’s always current. The agreement is created in the cloud and doesn’t ever leave the platform. Negotiation, signature, notary services (if necessary), and renewal, all take place on the same document. At any point, anyone with the right permissions can get visibility into the status of an agreement and monitor its progress. They can have complete confidence that the agreement they’ve found is the most up-to-date version. As the agreement process moves along, IAM will track updates in real time, logging agreement actions and tracking what needs to happen next.

Get started with Docusign IAM

Docusign has long been a leader in agreements and solving customer pain points around agreement workflows.The platform services and features described in this list are designed to meet the agreement needs of organizations today and in the future.

Learn more about how Docusign IAM can benefit your team by connecting the end-to-end agreement process.

Ready to get started? Contact our sales team today.