“With Adobe Sign, anyone sitting anywhere could have almost real-time access to documents, thereby reducing the time taken to complete documentation by about 80%. Adobe enabled a seamless transition to e-signing and digitising our documentation in a fast and secure manner.”

Sridhara N
Chief Technology Officer, Sonata Software

Technology to streamline business processes

Many processes across business operations involve lengthy manual documentation. These are required for legal, commercial or even internal purposes including finalising contracts, proposals, invoicing and more. However, organisations across the globe are increasingly turning to tech-enabled processes to enhance business. Sonata Software, one of the largest software systems integrators in India and a trusted service provider to Fortune 500 companies across the globe, was also looking to make a similar shift.

The company focuses on helping businesses drive value through IT investments in software product development. They also assist clients in maximising the effectiveness and productivity of their investments in software. As part of their operations, Sonata Software requires sizeable documentation and signatures at various steps – much like any other large IT organisation. Each document would take up to two weeks for clearances due to the requirement of physical signatures and couriers involved. This was a hurdle that the $150-million company was looking to overcome.

Thus, began the hunt for the best technological solution for enabling quicker processing of documents. And the project was christened, ‘Legal Portal Redefined’.

Adopting digital documentation

“We were looking for a replacement for our existing solution as there were many difficulties being faced by our associates at the time. When I met with the Adobe team and explained the situation, they offered just the solution we needed – Adobe Document Cloud. They explained that it can be configured and integrated with our systems easily and timely so that we don’t face any disruption in our business processes,” Sridhara N, Chief Technology Officer (CTO), Sonata Software.

The Adobe team met with Sonata Software in May 2017, and by the month of August, the company’s transition to Adobe Document Cloud was kicked off.

“The Adobe team has been extremely helpful. After all the assimilation, testing and quality checks, the integrated solution was rolled out as early as October 2017.”

The deployment process included integration with MS SharePoint, which is an existing, heavily used platform at Sonata Software. After all the assimilation, testing and quality checks, the integrated solution was rolled out as early as October 2017.

Prior to this implementation at Sonata Software, one resource was spending at least two days every week updating all these documents on SharePoint. With the seamless integration of Adobe Sign with SharePoint, the time required for digitalising documents drastically reduced. The time taken to finalise documents reduced from two-three weeks to two-three hours and e-signing of documents increased overall efficiencies by about 60%, and the feedback from customers on their experiences was extremely positive.

“With Adobe Sign, anyone sitting anywhere could have almost real-time access to documents – this reduced the time taken for clearing documents by about 80%. Earlier the documents would go on a sequential path from one desk to the other, from one executive to another, making it a slow and tedious process to get manual signatures, and upload our documents. With Adobe Document Cloud solution implemented, it now goes in parallel mode, making it an automated experience which has significantly condensed the workflow and time involved,” Sridhara N.

Meaningful experience/partnership

Sonata Software had received a recommendation to use Adobe Sign from one of their acquired companies based in the US. After comparing offers from other players in the market, Sonata chose to go ahead with an association with Adobe. “The response time from Adobe team is lightning fast. Whenever we raised a query, they came back with the solution in almost an hour with the required implementations,” added Sridhara.

Sonata Software, having observed the positive impact on business, is planning to extend Adobe Sign to other teams and departments within the organisation.