Ryder is a brand that is built around efficiency and innovation. The company manages critical fleet, transportation, and supply chain functions for tens of thousands of customers across North America, including more than half of the Fortune 500 companies. Ryder is always looking for ways to improve processes — both for its customers and internally.

Kyle Walker joined Ryder as part of the company’s latest initiative to reduce manual tasks through automation. While some departments already had process automation tools in place, the automated processes often operated in silos. With the Automation Center of Excellence, Ryder created a team dedicated to exploring the most effective ways to use technology to connect systems and scale automation across the company.

“When we free employees from menial tasks, they have more time to focus on meaningful, exciting tasks, such as working with customers to solve their transport problems,” says Walker. “In this way, better employee experiences lead to better customer experiences, which is a win for everyone.”

As one of the leads of Ryder’s Automation Center of Excellence, Walker works closely with teams across the company, listening to ideas from employees and searching for processes that can be improved through automation. One common point of frustration for all departments is paperwork. Whether onboarding new vendors in a supply chain, asking people receiving orders to sign off on a delivery, or getting acknowledgement for new policies from all employees, paperwork is critical for logistics and a key part of every job at Ryder.

“We’re constantly sending paperwork back and forth between Ryder employees, customers, and vendors,” says Walker. “There’s a cost associated with every piece of paper. There’s cost to generate, mail, send, and store paperwork. There’s also an impact on the environment, on customer experience, and on employee experience. By automating processes, we can reduce the impact of paperwork and improve experiences.”

The Automation Center for Excellence brought in multiple Adobe Document Cloud and Adobe Experience Cloud apps to support digital document workflows and streamline processes across the company. Adobe Acrobat forms the core of digital workflows with its universal format that supports document collaboration and storage. Adobe Experience Manager Forms brings documentation journeys online with easy-to-use workflows. Adobe Acrobat Sign adds the final piece to many paperwork processes with electronic signatures and end-to-end document workflows.

“While some teams were using a competitive solution in isolated contexts, Adobe Acrobat Sign is a more powerful enterprise solution with strong integrations and greater cost-effectiveness when used at scale,” says Walker. “Adobe Acrobat Sign currently supports 7,000 transactions per month, with demand still growing as people see the benefits of automation.”

Contracts signed with a click

Acrobat Sign was first brought on board to modernize how contracts are signed for the sales team. The sale team deals with huge volumes of contracts every year, working with customers to solve their transportation and supply chain needs. Like many teams at Ryder, the sales team was already using Adobe Acrobat to share and review contracts. But when it came time to send contracts to customers, contracts still needed to be printed, signed, mailed, and stored in a warehouse.

Acrobat Sign adds electronic signatures for a fully digital contract workflow. After review, Acrobat Sign is used to send contracts to customers’ email inboxes for signature. With just a few clicks, documents can be reviewed, signed, and returned. Working with Acrobat Sign accelerated signing time by 3x, allowing customers to start working with Ryder much sooner, while reducing the time spent on administrative tasks by 50%. This speed allows customers to start working with Ryder much sooner while also delivering an easier signing experience.

“Adobe Acrobat Sign has had a great impact on customer experience,” explains Joel Fullmer, Manager of Rental at Ryder. “It allows for customers to review and sign paperwork in real time from any device without needing to print, sign, scan, and send back.”

One of the biggest reasons that Ryder chose Acrobat Sign was its strong support for integrations. The integration between Acrobat Sign and Salesforce improves the efficiency of the contract workflow even further. The sales team uses Salesforce as a central CRM to track all customer information related to leads or opportunities. The Acrobat Sign integration allows sales representatives to create customer contracts and other new customer documentation directly through Salesforce. Without leaving the familiar Salesforce interface, sales representatives can send documents for signature, track signing process, and even view completed documents with a click.

“By providing a way for the sales team to create customer contract documents directly through Salesforce, we now have one centralized place to create and retain all documents for smoother transactions,” says Korri Adams, Director of Global Vehicle Sales Operations at Ryder. “Our customers are often driving on the road so it could take several days to get signed paper copies back, but now we have them in minutes.”

Creating fully automated documentation workflows

The Automation Center for Excellence takes advantage of integrations with numerous other solutions and apps—including Workday, Microsoft, and Adobe Experience Manager Forms—to implement end-to-end process automation for teams beyond sales, company-wide across Ryder.

Finance and HR departments use the Workday integration to pull information from Workday files into Acrobat Sign templates for faster and more accurate document creation. When documents are signed and returned electronically, a copy is stored in Workday where it can be referenced at any time.

The Automation Center for Excellence set up a new omnichannel intake process that helps customers and call center agents quickly create accurate claims. Customers are directed to an online intake form powered by Experience Manager Forms that guides customers through all of the information needed for the claim. Mandatory fields are clearly labeled, and fields can be verified or tabulated automatically, leading to more accurate information.

Completed forms are stored in Microsoft SharePoint. This triggers a Microsoft Power Automate workflow, which pulls information from the forms to create a case in the case management system, generate claims, and route them for review by managers and adjusters using Acrobat Sign.

“The most exciting thing about Adobe Acrobat Sign is how it fits together with other solutions to create end-to-end automated document workflows,” says Walker. “It supports our broader document management strategy by giving us multiple ways to connect solutions, create approval processes, and store documents electronically.”

Reducing stress and errors with universal templates

Ryder also uses Acrobat Sign as a standalone solution, taking advantage of templates and workflows to create fast and seamless document processes. The credit department handles payments for new deals. Because billing cycles and terms and conditions can vary slightly on each deal, the team previously juggled 23 templates. If the credit department accidentally picked the wrong template for a deal, they might resend paperwork to customer multiple times, drawing out the experience.

The Automation Center for Excellence combined all of these documents into a single, universal Acrobat Sign template. Drop-down selections and conditional fields change sections as needed, leading to less confusion and much faster document generation. Documents are signed three times faster with Acrobat Sign compared to email and wet signatures.

“Acrobat Sign gives us better control over a document intensive process,” says Wesley Fish, Director of Credit at Ryder. “We can lock down documents to prevent changes even as a document passes through many hands. When fully signed, everyone receives a clean copy to know that the process is complete.”

Putting the focus on higher-value work

Interest in Acrobat Sign continues to grow, with many departments requesting help from the Automation Center for Excellence to build integrated, automated workflows using Acrobat Sign. The transportation management center, for example, works with many document workflows every day related to proof of delivery and freight brokerage. Acrobat Sign can streamline many of these workflows with signing from anywhere.

“Part of successful automation is rethinking entire processes, from how we use documents to how we share information between processes,” says Walker. “Adobe Acrobat Sign is fantastic because it works to make any digital document process faster and smoother. Using automation streamlines menial tasks and empowers employees to focus on more interesting work, leading to enhanced job satisfaction and customer service across the company.”

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