Uber disrupts the transportation industry with Docusign CLM

Uber has transformed transportation around the globe, providing an alternative option to taxis and public transit. Ride sharing is a fixture of today’s modern world—in fact, since the launch of the company’s main ridesharing app in 2009, Uber has completed more than 5 billion rides, and has over 3 million drivers. The company’s number of employees has multiplied in size as well, from less than 100 to over 26,000 employees today. 

Much of Uber’s growth also came from adding new, innovative transportation offerings like Uber for Business, which organizes and manages rides, meals, and local deliveries for companies, and Uber Freight, an app that matches carriers with shippers. Naturally, these rapidly growing parts of Uber’s business brought in more employees and business opportunities—and therefore, more contracts. As Uber’s contract management demands increased, the company quickly realized that its existing infrastructure would need to be more efficient. 

To continue to scale at a rapid pace, Uber needed a way to manage contracts at the speed of its operations and growth. With Docusign CLM, Uber was able to streamline the contract lifecycle in multiple departments, including legal and sales. Docusign CLM empowered Uber with pre-defined templates, automated workflows and a central repository for storing contracts, all of which allowed for speedier contract processes, fewer errors and better collaboration across departments. This solution also provided Uber with the operational efficiency it needed to continue expanding its teams and product offerings around the world. 

Replacing manual contract management with automated processes 

Prior to Docusign CLM, Uber had been managing contracts manually using a combination of Google Docs and email. These processes were error-prone and slowed contract creation for the entire company. Contracts would get lost on the way to and from the sales or legal departments, forcing Uber’s sales staff to follow-up with legal on contracts as many as five times during each lifecycle. As a result, it was common for customers to receive and sign incorrect contracts.  

According to a Business Systems and Applications Manager at Uber, “employees would go to a page to generate a contract and then email it into this black hole. Then they’d just wait. They had no visibility.” 

Uber needed a digital solution that could streamline these workflows and was easy to use for every employee and created a better customer experience. 

“Not everyone we work with is technical, so we want to give them something that is user friendly,” explained Jodi Curtis, a Senior Technical Program Manager at Uber. 

Docusign CLM makes Uber’s operations as scalable as its offerings

Uber immediately saw an improvement in its operational efficiency with Docusign CLM. Uber digitized agreement process workflows in every department and configured each to eliminate bottlenecks and automate manual handoffs. And with Docusign CLM’s pre-defined templates, Uber can now easily build new contract workflows to automate other steps in the contract lifecycle, from approvals and redlining to routing. Included in Uber’s Docusign CLM integration is Docusign eSignature, which has helped the company automate the signature process for all of its contracts. With Docusign eSignature, Uber can be sure that all of its departments are getting signatures quickly, and from the correct parties. 

Docusign CLM also created a centralized repository for all of Uber’s contracts. In this secure and searchable archive, Uber employees now store, tag and organize all of their contracts. This increased oversight across departments resulted in fewer contract errors. It also reduced time previously spent tracking and searching for contracts—now, sales, legal and other departments can be more productive and focus on strategic work instead of manual tasks. 

Because the first phase of Uber’s tiered implementation of Docusign CLM was so successful, the company plans to continue rolling it out to new teams. Four more departments are slated to start using Docusign CLM next, which will then be followed by a business-wide implementation.