Self-service contracts for business users.

Transforming from paper processes in the analog world to digital workflows can improve accessibility, increase efficiency, and benefit the environment. But digitizing paperwork takes more than just a single step. At Adobe, home to Adobe Document Cloud and its rich digital document functionality, teams understand that they need to digitize every step of a document workflow to see the full benefits of digitalization.

“One mistake that people make when digitally transforming workflows is that they try to reinvent the wheel,” says E.A. Rockett, Senior Director, Office of the General Counsel at Adobe. “Most paper document workflows are already proven with decades of experience and refinement behind them. Digital workflows should follow those same familiar steps, while using technology to streamline and automate in ways that make work easier and faster. That’s how you achieve 100% user adoption in your digital workflows and immediately provide scale.”

Some of the most common documents handled by the Adobe legal team are quotes, sales contracts, procurement contracts, and non-disclosure agreements (NDAs). But the team was dissatisfied with existing industry digital contract lifecycle management (CLM) solutions, as they typically only offered rigid workflows and standard boilerplates or required costly customization.

In addition, while the majority of sales deals use standard terms, pricing, and conditions, the legal team still spent a great deal of their time drafting and reviewing every contract. By empowering sales representatives to close these standard deals by themselves, Adobe could accelerate contract execution while freeing up legal resources to concentrate on more complex contracts.

Adobe set out to solve the challenge with a new agreement solution built on Adobe Acrobat Sign and Adobe Acrobat Services APIs. Rockett worked with Ram Poornachandran, Director of Engineering at Center of Excellence and Enterprise Architect at Adobe, to lead a team to develop Agreement Experience: an easily customizable, end-to-end contracting solution capable of supporting both self-service and bespoke contracts.

“With Adobe Acrobat Services we can harness functionality in Adobe Document Cloud apps in a flexible way to change how we interact with documents,” says Poornachandran.

Fast, reliable contracts on demand

The Agreement Experience team started its design by breaking down typical enterprise document workflows into five actions: Generate, Approve, Execute, Store, and Discover. The team then built a custom contracting engine on the Microsoft Power Automate platform using Adobe Acrobat Services APIs and the Acrobat Sign API to fulfill all five steps digitally.

For sales agreements, the self-service process starts with an employee, such as a sales representative, choosing the products, language, and other options required for the contract. The Agreement Experience solution has a repository of modular paragraphs and phrases approved by the legal team, which are combined with a Microsoft Word document layout to dynamically generate the appropriate contract using the Acrobat Document Generation API.

“The Document Generation API works with JSON data, so it’s completely solution agnostic,” explains Poornachandran. “We can pull customer information from Salesforce, Microsoft Dynamics, or even multiple different CRM instances without needing to write complex integrations for each option.”

Agreement Experience then automatically moves the contract through different internal approvals, depending on the type of document and user persona, before executing the contract with the Adobe Acrobat Sign API for e-signatures. Completed documents are stored in the cloud as PDF documents, in a repository of choice. Finally, those documents are made discoverable, whether through search that helps staff find past contracts quickly, or analytics that helps to uncover insights into productivity or sales trends.

Creating or adjusting workflows, paragraphs, or document layouts often needs little or no coding skills. This means that attorneys can change contract language or add clauses for new contract options without requiring assistance from IT resources. By introducing the capability for self-service contract generation, sales representatives and other business users no longer need to wait for IT revisions or legal assistance on every contract. Ultimately, this leads to contracts being delivered to customers faster. At the same time, members of the legal team still use Agreement Experience even on complex, bespoke contracts to take advantage of the fast, automated digital workflow.

“More than 75% of sales contracts are projected to be generated, approved, and executed through the Agreement Experience self-service workflow. That will be a huge load off of our legal team,” says Rockett. “The end-to-end digital workflow also aims to improves the time to execute each contract by a projected 273%. We anticipate saving 36,000 hours annually on total contract processing time, which will be big for our business, and for our customers.”

Creating custom digital workflows for all documents

While Agreement Experience is currently being used primarily for sales contracts, the flexible, modular framework can be adapted to any type of documentation workflow. Adobe plans to expand use across the company, eventually handling everything from invoices and financial documentation to compliance policies and employment agreements.

“With Agreement Experience, we’ve built an intelligent self-service contracting solution that empowers sales teams to execute deals faster and allows our legal team to focus resources on the most strategic and complex deals,” says Rockett. “Agreement Experience shows how Adobe Acrobat Services APIs and the Acrobat Sign API can work together to create customizable solutions to tackle even the most complex enterprise challenges.”

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