How 3 Organizations Automated Their Procurement Processes

Procurement leaders have shown tremendous resiliency over the past few years, adapting to everything from supply chain disruptions to inflation. As those challenges persist today, procurement leaders face pressure to perform efficiently and innovate—often with fewer resources. For those contending with these heightened expectations, agreement management technology can be a game changer, empowering teams to create, commit to, and manage agreements faster and more efficiently. 

Let’s examine how three different organizations—a global parts distributor, a sprawling school system, and a government agency—adopted automation to improve their procurement processes, reduce costs, and unlock new opportunities.

Genuine Parts Company standardizes and streamlines global procurement workflows  

From its 1928 origins in Atlanta, Georgia, automotive parts distributor Genuine Parts Company (GPC) has evolved into a $20 billion company with operations in 17 countries. While this growth is impressive, it led to scattered processes: employees followed different procedures for managing third-party IT vendor contracts across the company, with documents stored on several platforms. The result was missed deadlines, licensing overspend, and lost opportunities for better negotiation with suppliers.    

Special Projects Manager Keith McCarraher saw a chance to standardize the management of procurement contracts with a contract management lifecycle (CLM) solution. Since rolling out the software, GPC’s contracts are consolidated in one place. Staff input details like contract type and supplier information, while additional data is pulled from PeopleSoft. Once a contract is initiated, Docusign CLM automatically assigns tasks and moves documents to the next stage—from review to risk assessment to signature collection.   

What started with IT vendor contracts evolved into a company-wide transformation, ultimately unifying processes, enhancing efficiency, and positioning GPC for seamless global operations. Since implementing Docusign, the company now achieves:

• Better visibility: GPC employees can easily view supplier spend and proactively manage renewals, terminations, and other deadlines within CLM. With this uniform data, CLM produces uniform biweekly reports for VPs about expiring contracts, enabling more strategic negotiations. 

• Significant savings: CLM alerts remind procurement to re-up contracts much earlier, giving the team greater negotiation leverage to reduce expenditures.

• Process standardization: From sales to HR, the many departments and regions of GPC now have a unified approach for all contract needs, going beyond just IT vendor agreements.  

• Enhanced security: GPC worked with Docusign Professional Services to configure Azure Single Sign-On for seamless access across third-party apps. This integration minimized the risk of managing multiple credentials and created a better user experience. 

Spring Branch Independent School District saves money and frees up resources 

Spring Branch Independent School District (ISD) in western Houston spans 46 campuses, supports 35,000 students, and solicits over 400 RFPs every year. Overseeing everything from cafeteria food to construction supplies, the district’s procurement department has the critical task of securing goods and services on time and within budget. Paper-based procurement processes, however, were severely limiting the team’s visibility into agreements, slowing turnaround times, and driving up spending through missed opportunities. School leaders outside the procurement department also managed some purchasing contracts, which created confusion and led to disconnected workflows. 

Seeing these inefficiencies, Director of Procurement Rick Gay implemented an eBid system equipped with Docusign eSignature to digitally manage supplier registrations, proposals, and MSAs. Not long after, when the COVID-19 pandemic forced school closures and an abrupt shift to remote work, executive stakeholders decided the procurement team should manage all purchasing contracts. 

With a higher volume of contracts to oversee, Gay identified Docusign CLM as the ideal solution to digitize, standardize, and automate the entire agreement lifecycle, from generation to management. Under the district’s new process, Docusign CLM alerts the procurement team about upcoming renewals and key events, helping them proactively manage supplier spend. This ultimately allows procurement to play a more strategic role and frees school leaders to focus on educational goals. 

With Docusign, Spring Branch ISD now sees:

• Signing within two days: CLM reduced the time to signature from several days or weeks to under two days for 80% of contracts. 

• $4 million in savings: The district has saved $4 million through digital procurement initiatives, which means more money for educational initiatives. 

• 1200 agreements in three months: Right after CLM implementation, within the first three months of the district’s new fiscal year, over 1,200 supplier agreements were managed through Docusign. 

• Reduced employee workload: Employees save time and effort by leveraging templates of commonly used documents within CLM and a Bulk Send feature to quickly send documents to multiple signers at once. 

• Increased supplier satisfaction: With Docusign, suppliers have fewer administrative tasks to complete and trust the agreements they’re signing are official and secure. 

California Natural Resources Agency simplifies and expedites complex workflows  

The California Natural Resources Agency (CRNA) is dedicated to restoring, protecting, and maintaining California’s natural, historical, and cultural resources. It’s also the parent agency of 26 departments, conservancies, and commissions, including the Department of Water Resources (DWR). When CNRA decided to test a new digital transformation initiative—that would later scale across the agency—it chose DWR to lead the effort. 

At DWR, signing and completing purchasing documents took several weeks, even months. The documents were costly and often filled with errors, sparking the need for a new system. As part of the digital transformation initiative, the department implemented Docusign to digitize and electronically deliver procurement contracts. 

The changes within DWR have been dramatic, including: 

• 75% cost savings: DWR has cut paper costs by 75%.

• Turnaround in minutes: Before Docusign, DWR could wait weeks to months before receiving signed documents. Now, it’s a matter of minutes. 

• Intuitive user experience: DWR can specify required fields and tag users in important sections before sending a document for review, reducing the likelihood of data entry errors. 

• Automation implementation in weeks: DWR has automated many of its most frequently used complex forms, speeding up digital form implementation from six to 12 months to a matter of weeks. 

• Rapid adoption and scale: DWR has now rolled out Docusign solutions for other use cases across the organization, provisioning over 3,500 employees with Docusign accounts. 

Elevate the role of procurement with Docusign IAM

Intelligent Agreement Management (IAM) is a new category of AI-powered cloud software that helps streamline and automate agreement processes. Docusign IAM combines CLM with the best Docusign solutions and services in one powerful portfolio that transforms the agreement experience for customers, suppliers, and employees. 

As procurement departments contend with higher expectations, agreement management technology helps them rise to meet the moment. As demonstrated by the success stories above, CLM can play a critical role in supporting procurement staff in solidifying their position as strategic leaders and serving as an inspiration and incubator for digital transformation across their organizations. 

If you’re ready to transform your agreement processes, learn more about how Docusign specifically helps procurement teams, and check out Forrester’s Total Economic Impact^TM of Docusign CLM.