Automating acquisitions with APIs

Improving employee processes through automation

Ramya Ramakrishnan has always been passionate about innovation — not just the technologies and ideas themselves, but how they empower people. As Manager of Talent Technology at Adobe, she spends her days working with teams across the company to make their processes simpler, faster, and more efficient.

“My ideal solution is one that takes a smart application of Adobe technology to create positive outcomes for both employees and the business,” says Ramakrishnan.

Most recently, Ramakrishnan brought her innovative touch to the Adobe corporate mergers & acquisitions (M&A) team. During a typical acquisition, the M&A team works closely with half a dozen groups across Adobe to gain insights about potential employees from an acquired company, such as their role, pay, and benefits, to determine how they fit into the Adobe structure before sending an offer letter.

But managing a smooth transition for hundreds or even thousands of employees during an acquisition is no small feat. Each step required time spent gathering information, analyzing results, and stakeholder approvals. The M&A team often resorted to manually updating spreadsheets — a process that could be time-consuming and error-prone.

Ramakrishnan realized that no one tool could fully address this complex process. She oversaw the development of a custom M&A application that’s built on a backbone of Microsoft Power Platform with APIs supporting core integrations and capabilities. The Adobe Document Generation API, part of Adobe Acrobat Services, provides one of the most important steps in the process, turning data into hundreds of offer letters within seconds and sending them out for signature through Adobe Acrobat Sign.

“We look at all potential solutions on the market, not just those from Adobe. The Document Generation API stands out for its functionality and flexibility, providing what we need to automate M&A processes,” says Ramakrishnan.

“With dynamic data updates, we eliminated errors since migrating to the new solution.”

Ramya Ramakrishnan

Manager of Talent Technology, Adobe

Reducing M&A time and errors

The custom standalone M&A solution handles all processes before the hire stage and integrates with applications used by Adobe teams, such as Workday, to automatically update prospective employees into the master database, reducing the time to update records by at least 50%. Rather than needing two people to maintain data, the M&A team now needs just one person to double-check records. This does more than just save time, freeing up a member of the team to analyze, process, and approve prospective employees’ offers faster. It also dramatically reduces the chance of errors.

“The M&A team might be handling an acquisition with hundreds or thousands of prospective employees, and it’s not unusual to see a handful of minor errors. With dynamic data updates, we eliminated errors since migrating to the new solution,” says Ramakrishnan.

Generating thousands of offer letters in five minutes

Once the M&A team finishes reviewing information on all potential employees during an acquisition, they need to compile offer letters — which can range from tens to thousands of letters depending on the size of an acquired company. Using the Adobe Document Generation API, Ramakrishnan and her technology team built a workflow that automatically pulls data from the master database into custom templates, generates PDF documents, and sends them for e-signature with the click of a button. The API also includes security options, adding password protection that prevents unauthorized parties from opening offer letters.

“We can now generate and send all offer letters in five minutes, saving around 80 hours of work per acquisition,” says Ramakrishnan. “The automated process also scales easily so that larger acquisitions don’t take significantly more time. We can get offer letters out faster and make a better first impression with potential new employees.”

Every region has specific regulations, requiring different types of offer letter templates. Maintaining those templates was previously tedious, as the M&A team received change requests almost weekly from global teams. Now teams can easily update templates for their region by editing the template in Microsoft Word or Adobe Acrobat. This offloads template management and helps to ensure that offer letters are updated to comply with regional regulations as quickly as possible, avoiding potential costly delays or last-minute edits to offer letters.

Expanding functionality with automation and APIs

Ramakrishnan and her technology team continue to expand the M&A solution with new offer letter templates for smaller regions or specialty use cases. They’re also working on adding functionality with Adobe PDF Services APIs, such as combining generated offer letters with existing PDF documentation to create an offer package for potential employees.

“With the productivity gained through automation, the M&A team can easily keep on top of their work, even during large or complex acquisitions, without requesting additional support,” says Ramakrishnan. “By scaling through innovative acquisitions and ensuring seamless transitions for future talent, helping Adobe maintain its reputation as a digital leader.”