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SAP Signature Management by DocuSign

How E-Signature Changed SAP

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© 2017 SAP SE or an SAP affiliate company. All rights reserved.

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY Everyone working in sales or handling contracts in large enterprises knows the situation: At the end of the quarter, investors and analysts are curious. CEOs and sales people are nervous. All deals must be closed by midnight. And the legal department is in the midst of it with lawyers and contract personnel often working through the night to get things done. And then the shock: One signature is missing. The relevant individual is on vacation, and the papers cannot be sent or faxed there in time. The deal is in jeopardy. Luckily, electronic signature software like SAP Signature Management can help. With SAP Signature Management, SAP employees can sign contracts electronically and send them from any device – for faster, easier, and more-secure contract execution.

HOW IT ALL STARTEDIn 2013 the global contract management services team at SAP received a corporate mandate from our CFO, Luka Mucic: “Digitalize our contracting processes – globally – for all contract types and use cases.”

The mandate affected our contract execution process because “ink on paper” was the only method we used back then. Moving away from paper-based processes was critical in order to support the quickly changing pace of business, and it required convincing all parties involved in the contracting process. On the surface, gaining approvals and moving documents seamlessly between departments, customers, partners, suppliers, and employees may seem like a simple task. However, paper-based systems require physical signatures, which results in great inefficiency in the contracting process.

Agility is a core competency for SAP. As a leading enterprise software company, we digitalize the world – and ourselves, our internal processes, and our business with clients, partners, and suppliers. In deploying the SAP® Signature Management application by DocuSign, we closed the digital gap between contract creation and storage. With a great user experience, the application brings speed of execution, flexibility, and security to our contracting processes – and helps us make the world run better.

“With SAP Signature Management, we closed the digital gap between contract creation and storage. With a great user experience, the application brings speed of execution, flexibility, and security to our contracting processes.”Ingrid Nikkels, Global DocuSign Deployment Lead, SAP

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We found our selves spending too much time chasing people and mailing supplier contracts, statements of work, amendments, confidentiality agreements, and other documents – rather than focusing on the value-added activities.

We assembled a small project team and went to work. We talked to stakeholders, defined our con-tracting requirements, researched the software market, and evaluated existing products. In the end, the e-signature solution by DocuSign stuck out – it simply offered the best solution for us.

DISCOVERING AND DEPLOYING THE SOLUTIONThrough the cloud-based e-signature solution by DocuSign, contract recipients are e-mailed a link to a document stored in the cloud, and each party can review the document and apply a sig-nature. Signatures may be added from a stored copy of a signature or generated automatically by the software.

We decided to purchase only a few user licenses at first to familiarize ourselves with the solution. As part of our discovery phase, we started a pilot for a specific use case, one with a sufficiently large volume of contracts supported by a small and homogeneous user group: platform partner agreements. This pilot run lasted six months – and was a big success. Not only could we prove that, with the solution, contracts were signed much faster, but also the users who collected the electronic signatures liked working with the solution – and there were no technical issues or system downtimes.

After this successful pilot, we proposed to the SAP Executive Board the use of signature management for all SAP contracts. Our business case anticipated what became the new corporate reality just 24 months later: Implementing signa-ture management at SAP has significantly accel-erated legal transactions and reduced corporate costs. As a result, SAP became not only a cus-tomer but also a partner in selling SAP Signature Management by DocuSign. CHANGE MANAGEMENT IS CRUCIALIt took time and significant effort to achieve this happy ending. After the SAP Executive Board sent out an internal mail announcing the global deployment of SAP Signature Management, we set up a small deployment team (four individuals working the equivalent of two full-time employ-ees) with responsibility for user administration, system settings, information and best-practice sharing, training materials and sessions, and defining and implementing system integrations.

We defined six stakeholder groups and took care to understand their particular roles and solution expectations:

• Senders are solution users responsible for preparing and sending contracts for signature through SAP Signature Management. Once senders have seen the e-signature solution, they will want to use it.

• Template creators are key users or team leads responsible for the creation of “signing workflow” templates. Once they have seen the solution and the benefits of template use, template creators will want to use it.

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• Signers are users who e-sign the contracts and documents sent through SAP Signature Management. Once they have signed the contracts, signers will want to use the solution for all their signatures.

• Viewers are mostly account executives (AEs) or other sales managers who need tracking visibility for contracts to be signed by their accounts. Among sales viewers, solution adop-tion can be challenging, as some AEs and their accounts are more open to digitalization than others.

• Legal advisors need to be aware of the e-signature solution and the related legislation in their respective countries. Among legal advi-sors, solution adoption can also be challenging, depending on local legislation and relevant knowledge.

• Global IT employees build and support technical solutions (interfaces). With the help of the IT support team, we can interface SAP Signature Management to our existing system landscape to increase automation and enable end-user support for technical issues.

With a clear understanding of the business requirements and with sound stakeholder management, our project team began tackling its largest and most challenging use case: software license agreements (for on-premise software). At this point, the project was at a criti-cal juncture and ran into a number of challenges.

Legal IssuesWhen global deployment started, the validity of electronic signatures around the world was unclear. We queried the local legal experts to provide legal advice for their countries based on local legislations. The results have been pub-lished and are available for all SAP employees. The good news was that in the majority of the countries, there were no legal issues with the use of electronic signatures. In the European Union, we even have a new regulation called “eIDAS,” making e-signatures legally permissible in all member states. All-in-all, there are only a few countries in the world where electronic signa-tures are not yet valid (such as the Common-wealth of Independent States and Turkey).

“Digital transformation is entirely changing SAP’s business model – and we need to be both streamlined and agile. When we want to Run Simple at SAP, we need to reduce complexity in our internal processes and systems.” Christian Klein, Chief Operating Officer, SAP SE

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Involving Our CustomersThe central deployment team created a letter translated into 24 languages, which we provid-ed to our stakeholders to disseminate to their contractual parties before ever sending con-tracts through SAP Signature Management. In this letter, we briefly explained that we would use SAP Signature Management for the execu-tion of contracts. The letter further explained the benefits of doing so, how it works, and where customers could find more information. We also briefed our account executives who, as part of the deal closure, would bring the e-signature topic to the table as well. Most customers were willing to sign electronically, but we encountered some issues when some of their internal policies did not yet support electronic signatures. In those cases, we would sign electronically, and they would still sign using ink on paper.

Involving Our Account ExecutivesSince electronic signatures were a relatively new phenomenon, our customers had to be informed before we started sending them our contracts for signature through SAP Signature Management. Our opinion was that the account executives were best equipped to convince their customers of the benefits of e-signature, since

they were already regarded as trusted advisors. Our deployment team supported the account executives with custom-made documentation and also provided many information sessions. The objective was to explain the usage and the benefits for our own organization, as well as for our contractual parties, so that, in the end, SAP Signature Management would be used for collecting both the internal signatures and customer signatures as well.

Looking back, we believe the project team was able to overcome the above challenges by virtue of a shared vision – the same vision that initialized the e-signature project as a whole: collaboration. In critical situations, the DocuSign deployment team, SAP regional leads, local contract managers, and all who were involved in the project collaborated as one team – and, together, we got things done. Step-by-step, after we had mastered our most-critical e-signature use case – software license agreements – we added more contract types and processes. Within two years, we deployed SAP Signature Management for more than 30 use cases, covering contractual processes in sales, finance, legal, marketing, sales deve-lopment, facility management, and human resources.

“All our contracts are sent to our partners via SAP Signature Management by DocuSign, and most of them we receive back on the same day. This would never be possible without SAP Signature Management.” Fred Herzog, VP Operations, HCP Partner Innovation, Global Channels & General Business, SAP

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WHERE WE ARE NOWSAP employees now use SAP Signature Management not only as a stand-alone solution, but also integrated with SAP Ariba® solutions through the standard interface (for procurement agreements). The solution has also been inte-grated with our custom-developed solution with-in the SAP ERP application, SAP governance, risk, and compliance solutions, the SAP Identity Management (SAP ID Management) component, and Anaqua software using standard application programming interfaces.

This integration with other systems allows us to automate e-signature envelope creation and automatically store signed contracts in the right location. We have created four accounts related to SAP Signature Management covering com-mercial, procurement, intellectual property, and HR use cases. Over 75,000 documents have been signed using SAP Signature Management – with over 50,000 in 2016 alone. The figure below shows the growing number of “envelopes” (or e-signatures through e-mail) from 2013 through 2016.

The average time for contract execution in SAP Signature Management is less than 6 days, and in 2016, 70% of the envelopes were completed with full contract execution occurring through the application. It is not yet 100%, but we see a positive trend as more and more of our contrac-tual parties are willing to sign electronically.

Where We Are GoingIn 2017 we started deploying SAP Signature Management for HR documents (where legally allowed), integrate e-signature with our own analytics solution, and automate user creation through SAP ID Management so employees can get access to SAP Signature Management (and automatic deletion after they leave). For the final step in 2018, we plan to fully integrate SAP Signature Management with our new con-tract management solution – SAP S/4HANA® for legal content.

In future, we plan to also use other standard integrations, including interfaces to SAP SuccessFactors®, SAP Hybris®, SAP Fieldglass®, and Concur® solutions. We aim to increase security and reduce costs, while increasing compliance and speeding contract execution for any document that requires signatures.

“Deploying the DocuSign solution was more an exercise in change management than an implementation project.” William Bright, DocuSign Success Agent, SAP

Figure: Cumulative Annual Envelope Activity in SAP Signature Management, 2013–2016

52,816

74,041

Envelopes Completed

Envelopes Sent

0 20,000 40,000 60,000 80,000 100,000 120,000 140,000

2013 2014 2015 2016

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• Start small and prove success – Run a small pilot first to convince the organization, and only then go “full-steam ahead.”

• Be ready to scale – Establish a central team that “owns” the partner account and sets the standards in your company, for example, by writing a policy and by providing guidelines on how to use SAP Signature Management company-wide.

50042enUS (17/04) © 2017 SAP SE or an SAP affiliate company. All rights reserved.

OUR LESSONS LEARNEDBased on our experiences, we would like to provide four recommendations to all companies interested in deploying SAP Signature Management:

• Get sponsorship from the top – This may be true for all projects – yet it is especially true for projects such as e-signature deployment that involve sensitive information and legal issues.

• Get your legal in-house department involved – If your general counsel is not already convinced, ask your board sponsor to provide direction, as you will certainly not win this battle if your own legal department is against you.

“Only if internal and external signatures are collected via SAP Signature Management can our contract- execution process be entirely digital.”Kai Jacob, SAP Head of Global Contract Management Services (GCMS), SAP

© 2017 SAP SE or an SAP affi liate company. All rights reserved.

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