Jai Gulati is passionate about three things: people, processes, and technology. “At the end of the day, processes and technology are important because they touch people,” says Gulati. “We want to use the best technologies and create the best processes, but it should all be for the purpose of supporting people.”

After years of working in high tech, financial services, and telecommunications, Gulati joined innovative biotechnology company Regeneron, first as Global Head of IT Operations and now as Global Head of Application Services & Intelligent Automation. Regeneron is known as a scientific trailblazer, researching therapies and developing new medicines for serious diseases and conditions such as cancer, blindness-causing diseases and the Ebola virus. In recent years, the company made headlines for its work treating and preventing COVID-19.

“I love how everyone working at Regeneron has a passion for helping patients, finding treatments for diseases, and doing the right thing,” says Gulati. “It’s why I’ve stayed with the company for so long.”

Standardizing on Adobe Acrobat Sign

After overseeing a transformation of the IT infrastructure, Gulati was tasked with rethinking applications. “Technology and processes can have an impact on patients, as there are many tools utilized along the way from a scientist making a critical discovery, to studying the resulting investigational medicine, to manufacturing and delivering it to people in need,” explains Gulati.

Gulati created an application service team that focused on delivering sustainable, scalable, and reliable applications and processes across the company. By starting from a strong and agile foundation, Gulati aimed to deliver IT services in weeks instead of months. When researching applications in use across the company, the application services team discovered several groups using Adobe Acrobat Sign for digital document workflows.

Documentation is critical in the pharmaceutical and medical fields, and many of these documents require signatures. For instance, manufacturing teams need to maintain detailed records to comply with the FDA and other regulatory agencies. As with many companies, there are also day-to-day signature requirements such as new vendor contracts, employment offer letters and server access authorizations.

Several groups had independently decided to use Adobe Acrobat Sign to help streamline signatures and documentation. But Gulati recognized that there were dozens of other potential use cases across the company. The application services team decided to deploy Adobe Acrobat Sign as an enterprise service.

“With an enterprise approach to Adobe Acrobat Sign, we could take advantage of capabilities such as single sign-on and enhance data privacy and security with a standard architecture,” says Gulati. “Adoption is the key to any new technology. Since Adobe Acrobat is widely used across the company, we knew that people would be more likely to adopt an e-signature solution from a familiar and reliable vendor.”

Facing the pandemic with remote signing

Gulati incorporated Adobe Acrobat Sign into a larger digital initiative aimed at encouraging a nimble workforce by enabling people to work from anywhere. Just two weeks after starting the pilot program, the COVID-19 pandemic forced employees to work from home. Demand for Adobe Acrobat Sign access soared across the company.

“It takes just two weeks to roll out Adobe Acrobat Sign to a new group,” says Gulati. “Achieving fast rollout involves setting the right expectations and working with the right partners. No technology is going to work exactly the way you plan, but good providers like Adobe will innovate and work with you to help you achieve your goals. It’s also important to stay agile, because along the way you may discover new use cases that you hadn’t considered before.”

Accelerating treatment with fast paperwork

Adobe Acrobat Sign is now used across Regeneron. The legal and manufacturing teams are two of the heaviest users. Legal uses Adobe Acrobat Sign for signatures on all types of legal documentation, including non-disclosure agreements, statement of work agreements, and contracts with outside counsel. Manufacturing documents every step of the medicine creation process to meet stringent compliance regulations.

The application services team works with teams across Regeneron to create Adobe Acrobat Sign templates and web forms that digitize and automate documentation workflows. Working with Adobe Acrobat Sign, teams can automatically create documents, route them to the right people for signature and approvals and track the progress of each signed document. By eliminating the need for signers to print and scan documents, documents get signed much faster and with less effort.

“Adobe Acrobat Sign increases internal efficiencies, but it also allows us to improve how we interact with signers by giving them a fast, easy, and touchless method of handling documents,” says Anand Shah, Senior Manager of Service Delivery for Regeneron.

“We estimated that by switching to an automated Adobe Acrobat Sign web form, one particular team was able to save $633,000 and 4,608 hours a year through more efficient processes. As well, by eliminating paper waste, we save nearly 2,600 gallons of water consumption,” adds Shah.

Scaling access through partners and integrations

By prioritizing integrations with technology partners in the Adobe ecosystem, the application services team is quickly scaling Adobe Acrobat Sign across the enterprise into applications such as Veeva, Microsoft 365, and Teams. Integration with iCertis allows the HR team and recruiters to automatically generate contract offers and send them for signature through the iCertis interface. Automating this process reduces the time to process contracts by 96%, accelerating the processing time from 2 hours to 4.8 minutes—a huge savings when processing thousands of contracts a year.

The HR team also takes advantage of Workday integrations to process thousands of employment offers a year to internal and external candidates. Automating the manual process will save an estimated $3.2 million annually, nearly eliminating print and paper costs while saving 23,000 process hours.

“Technology is changing so rapidly that it’s hard to predict where we’ll be in five years,” adds Gulati. “We’re still discovering new processes where we can apply Adobe Acrobat Sign. By improving internal processes, streamlining manufacturing, and supporting research, we can make more efficient progress towards our mission of turning science into medicine for patients.”

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