How We Use Docusign IAM Solutions in Legal Ops and Procurement

Legal operations and procurement teams work together closely to manage supplier relationships, negotiate contracts, and monitor key agreement terms and milestones like SLAs and renewal dates. This partnership is crucial to delivering consistent, effective legal and procurement services to the entire enterprise.

For both functions, the ability to access, view, and manage supplier agreements is essential. Recently, Docusign’s legal ops and procurement departments began optimizing their operations using Intelligent Agreement Management (IAM), a new SaaS category that helps streamline and automate agreement processes. 

Specifically, our teams use two core platform services in the new Docusign IAM portfolio: Docusign Navigator and Docusign Maestro. Navigator is powered by Docusign AI to easily locate agreements, surface critical data, and develop a clearer picture of contractual relationships. Maestro helps build and deploy customized workflows to accelerate agreement processes without writing any code. 

This project is part of the “Docusign @ Docusign” Customer Zero program, which allows internal departments to use Docusign’s emerging solutions to drive digital transformation. It also offers a unique opportunity to influence the product development and enhancement cycle to benefit customers. 

“Docusign @ Docusign is all about using our own products in-house to improve our business processes,” said Sandy MacDonnell, head of legal operations. “It's unique because we run our business using our best-in-class solutions and provide feedback to the product team, helping them improve the way our products function for all our users.”

Objective: attain optimal visibility and efficiency in legal operations and procurement

Before implementing Navigator in legal ops and procurement, the two functions frequently relied on spreadsheets to try to get more real-time, actionable intelligence about their agreements. This process was inefficient and time-consuming, resulting in less-than-optimal outcomes, like higher error rates and missed renewal dates.

In addition, procurement is not always involved in every supplier contract negotiation. As a result, without a centralized location to store and access existing agreements, our teams would often lack visibility into key contract provisions and milestones, current relationship status, and essential connections between parent organizations and their subsidiaries, leading to increased risk and lost time.

Like many organizations, Docusign occasionally misses auto-renewal deadlines for contracts we meant to cancel. With Navigator, our team now gets notified automatically to cancel on time and avoid unnecessary expenses and the “soft costs” of time spent pursuing a resolution. Catching just a couple of these missed due dates and unintentional payments through improved insight into supplier agreements can quickly pay for the solution.

Likewise, limited visibility into SLAs made it challenging to efficiently track and capture performance credits and claim supplier penalties. This pointed to the need for better monitoring processes to ensure supplier compliance and contractual adherence.

Another challenge with procurement agreement sprawl was determining whether required supplier insurance certificates were current. Addressing this helps us better mitigate potential liabilities related to data breaches, errors, and omissions, especially for suppliers providing services in highly regulated industries. 

A smart agreement repository provides deep data insights

Docusign Navigator goes beyond simply centrally storing agreements by unlocking hidden data and unearthing valuable insights that would otherwise be missed. The deployment timeline—including adding thousands of historical documents—took only a few days, delivering improved visibility into completed agreements and immediate value to our procurement team.

To date, legal ops has used standard features to quickly and easily upload thousands of historical agreements into the repository, and Navigator automatically captures every new supplier agreement processed through Docusign eSignature. Because Navigator and eSignature are fully integrated through the Docusign IAM ecosystem, there’s no need for custom coding or APIs.

“Navigator is helping my team quickly ID upcoming renewals—the reporting provides an easy-to-use and -filter user experience,” said Brian White, senior director of procurement and sourcing. “Previously, the team relied partially on spreadsheets and internal task tracking tools; Navigator provides a far superior dashboard. As a leader, I like that because it lets me zoom out and look across the entire buy-side landscape and also zoom in to see a subset of renewals based on a variety of filterable fields.”

Thanks to improved alignment of their contracting processes, our legal and procurement teams are now better equipped to respond to internal business inquiries and renewal reminders faster and with less time and effort.

“I get Slack messages and emails all day from the business asking whether we have a relationship with a specific supplier,” White said. “Historically, I've had to either go into my supplier contracts spreadsheet or ask the legal team for an answer. Navigator has enabled my team to go in and do a quick check to see if we have an active relationship or to determine whether we have a certain document, such as an NDA in place with the supplier. Now, even with those little interactions that we’re having with the business, we’re saving time for legal and our procurement staff while enhancing visibility into agreements to benefit our business.”

No-code automation enables self-service contracting and adaptable cross-functional workflows

Docusign IAM has also enabled our legal and procurement teams to tackle another common contracting use case, helping to streamline the process for new suppliers to sign high-volume, low-risk NDAs. 

MacDonnell successfully leveraged Docusign Maestro’s no-code automation tool to quickly build a simple workflow. The enhancement prompts the supplier to complete a few easy fields using a Web Form before electronically signing the document in eSignature. The completed agreement is then automatically routed to Navigator for electronic filing and storage.

“This workflow we built is a new and improved way for our suppliers to sign an NDA,” MacDonnell said. “It can be done in a matter of seconds because it's a very simple workflow, and I was able to build it myself in five minutes using Maestro.”

Docusign Maestro is a critical part of the Docusign IAM engine, boosting productivity and speed with workflows that automate any process, exactly how you want it. For any type of agreement, Maestro reduces sticking points like manual data entry so end users can complete transactions faster and easier.

“Maestro is very provocative for a procurement organization because we take a huge variety of requests from our internal business customers,” White said. “These requests range from addressing supplier performance issues to purchasing new technology and everything in between. We use intake and workflow tooling to help take those requests, route them on the right tracks, and then send them to the right places for disposition. And each of those processes is a little different.

“Maestro allows us to quickly create and refine workflows and also enables those workflows to integrate really well with other systems, such as Workday and our HR structure, other Docusign solutions, our procure-to-pay ecosystem and other tooling. That's a huge unlock.”

Docusign IAM is the agreement suite your business needs

Docusign IAM automates the entire contract lifecycle with AI capabilities across every step and unlocks the critical business value hidden in agreements. Maestro and Navigator are only available as part of IAM, the complete portfolio dedicated to end-to-end agreement management. Take this guided tour to learn how Docusign IAM can revolutionize your agreement management.