YOUR SIGNATURE MOVEFive great reasons to make electronic signatures a part of your business.

January 2017 | Your signature move 2

Set your business to full speed ahead. And don’t look back.

Make your work flow.

Send and sign documents in zero seconds flat.

Put e-signatures into action—no sweat.

Legally binding. Professionally liberating.

Secure data at the speed of business.

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Table of CONTENTS

3January 2017 | Your signature move

The digital tools powering today’s modern businesses make work faster, easier, and more accurate. But there’s still one tool that many companies have yet to adopt— the electronic signature.

If you’re still using archaic, paper-based processes to get documents signed, you’re not alone. 80 percent of business document processes today involve printing, scanning, and faxing papers manually.1 And that means spending time correcting errors, tracking down and reminding people, and having to file and maintain all of your physical documents. Managing and collecting signatures is not only a massive roadblock in your workflow, it’s damaging to your brand image and customer experience.

It doesn’t have to be this way.

Set your business to FULL SPEED AHEAD. And don’t look back.

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• More than a third (37 percent) of business leaders say they have problems with agreements that are missing signatures, initials, or dates—or that have been signed by the wrong person.

• Nearly half (46 percent) aren’t sure they have copies of all signed agreements.

• Just over half (51 percent) say they have problems with documents that are misfiled or lost.2

The pains of pen-and-ink

signatures.

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19 Days Faster

1 Million Sheets Saved

• Telefonica cut the average time to get employee contracts signed and returned by 92 percent. A process that typically took three weeks was cut down to 11 hours.3

• LeasePlan had an average contract completion time of 23 and a half days. They were able to cut 19 days off the cycle, reducing the paperwork burden and giving salespeople more time to work with new customers.4

• Royal Dutch Airlines eliminated the printing of one million sheets of paper in a single year by using electronic signatures in their travel rewards program with partners.5

E-signatures make for many happy returns.

92% Less Time

Imagine knowing exactly what the most current version of a sales contract is and where it is at any given time, and having all of your customer’s contact information automatically populated into it. Imagine your document auto-routing itself to others when additional signatures are needed, and being able to track it, set up reminders, and see reports on which signatures you have out and which are complete.

And imagine your client simply opening and signing your contract on their mobile device without downloading a new app or signing up for anything.

Electronic signatures are quickly becoming the way businesses get documents signed and close deals faster. But not all solutions are equal. The best are simple for employees and clients to use. They integrate with the digital systems you already have in place. And they’re a legal, secure solution for streamlining document signatures. Here are just five of the many reasons to adopt e-signatures now—so you can embrace the future of business communication.

January 2017 | Your signature move

“We pride ourselves on being an innovative tech company, so a manual signature process didn’t fit with our core values.”

MATT MAIMONITalent Operations Manager Foursquare7

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Electronic signatures speed up business processes. Today, e-signature solutions have evolved to encompass much more than just collecting signatures electronically—they automate the entire operation, from document creation, collaboration and execution, to archiving and management.

Business leaders say their staff spends more than one-third of their time on administrative tasks.6 With a cloud-based and automated e-signature solution, you’ll reduce the time employees spend on administrative activities like hunting down and processing documents.

1. MAKE your work flow.E-signatures equal big

benefits. For everyone.

• Business leaders say that improving document processes could a yield 23% reduction in business/compliance risk.

• Research shows a potential 30% reduction in cost and 36% increase in revenue.

• 45% of business leaders say departmental productivity would increase.

• 72% agree that improving document processes would increase customer satisfaction and/or increase brand value.9

Get internal processes on the inside track.By moving your business to electronic signatures, you’ll speed up HR processes such as offer letters, new hire documents, and employee policy acknowledgements. You’ll be able to streamline legal and procurement operations by automating the process for nondisclosure agreements, vendor contracts, and confidential business-to-business agreements.

Just as in candidate recruiting, e-signature solutions can play a helpful role in onboarding, keeping the entire process of hiring employees as frictionless and time saving as possible.

For the Talent team at Foursquare, an innovative tech company, employee procedures such as onboarding were lengthy, manual processes that resulted in redundant records and tons of wasted paper. “We’ve moved towards a paperless environment and streamlined our agreements with a tool so easy to use, groups across the company are pushing to adopt it,” says Talent Operations Manager Matt Maimoni.8

January 2017 | Your signature move

Less time to sign. More customer loyalty.Getting e-signatures into your workflow also means you’ll improve customer experiences and differentiate yourself from the competition. These days, customers are comfortable conducting business using web and mobile devices, and they’re demanding digital experiences so that they can conduct business anytime, anywhere. Offering a convenient, quick means of getting work done not only helps demonstrate your value as a brand, it’s crucial to your company’s longevity.10

Electronic signatures also accelerate sales documents, eliminating days’ worth of paperwork and reducing wait times from days to minutes—helping you to more easily meet sales quotas. By automating the creation of e-sales documents and contracts, and enabling customers to sign electronically, you can decrease the time to receive revenue and increase the deal closure rate. It’s good for you and your customers. Everyone’s happy.

Global human capital management technology company, Ceridian, increased the number of proposals processed by 40 percent without increasing staffing, which helped improve cost margins by up to 15 percent. “Sales representatives can spend more time working with new clients, developing ongoing and in-depth conversations that nurture relationships and increase our base of loyal customers,” says Amy Roy, vice president of sales operations at Ceridian.11

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7January 2017 | Your signature move

E-signature platforms offer simple, intuitive processes that won’t slow you down. Your employees can work with web and mobile apps, or you can add signing workflows to the tools they use every day—productivity apps like Microsoft Word and Dropbox, and enterprise apps such as Salesforce and Workday—so there’s nothing new to learn, and no special software required.12 No matter where you’re doing business, electronic signature solutions can make preparing and sending a document a simple, fluid process. It’s easy to specify which documents and participants to include, prefill form fields, or include instructions for the recipient. You can create reusable workflow templates to help ensure repeatable, error-free results—preventing common mistakes, such as missing a required signature or using an outdated document.

2. Send and sign documents in ZERO seconds flat.Users can quickly prepare new documents for e-signing or approval, and you can add signature and form fields as needed. Send to one or more recipients, and let people sign in parallel or serial order, or a combination of the two. And you can track the status of any document in real time—set your preferences to get notifications when people sign or to automatically send out reminders when they don’t.13

International Fortune 500 company NetApp uses e-signatures for its nondisclosure agreements (NDAs). Rather than waiting for the legal department to issue each NDA separately, sales representatives can now use their e-signature platform to instantly route the NDA and have it signed by the client from any tablet or laptop device. NDA templates are already preapproved by NetApp’s legal team and comply with legal requirements for different regions, allowing sales representatives to simply choose the appropriate template.14

Mobile apps that integrate electronic signatures let your workers connect and stay productive wherever they go. Using a smartphone or tablet, they can access stored documents, collect signatures in person, send documents for signature, and manage the signing process quickly and easily. It’s just easy on the customer’s end, too. They’ll be delighted by fast response times and speedy contract-signing processes. And they can sign from anywhere without printing or faxing documents, installing software, creating new log-ins, or scanning anything. The entire process can take just minutes from start to finish, so everyone can finish quickly and get on with their day.

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Implementing e-signature technology into your workflow is easy. Electronic signature platforms are rolling out built-in integration capabilities, so that you can seamlessly use them with other enterprise applications, like those used in Salesforce or Workday, and share information across departments—leading to tremendous time savings for staff.

These days it’s possible to do it yourself using intuitive administrative tools and a few step-by-step tutorials—so you can have your team up and running in minutes.

To keep pace with strong growth and better serve small merchants, e-commerce company Groupon decided to streamline contract workflows by integrating an electronic signature platform with its Salesforce CRM solution. After entering details about a merchant into Salesforce, a business consultant can initiate the contract process for e-signatures. Contract templates live in Salesforce and are pushed to a document creation program and then to their e-signature platform. The contract is then automatically routed to the merchant. As a result, Groupon used their e-signature solution to increase the number of agreements sent by more than 11 percent in a year.15

Through an integrated electronic signature platform, Ceridian has created automated workflows that allow staff to smoothly nurture an opportunity into a signed contract from a single interface. To date, the organization has executed nearly 20,000 primary quotes, processed more than 15,000 approvals, and handled more than 6,000 signatures. Ceridian sales representatives spend less time switching between multiple tools, drafting contracts, and waiting for returned signatures. As a result, the overall quoting cycle time decreased by as much as 80 percent. “Our previous manual processes involved a lot of scanning and emailing documents for signatures, reviews, and approvals,” says Amy Roy. “Sales representatives now use automated workflows to draft and manage quotes and contracts directly through Salesforce.”16

3. Put e-signatures into ACTION—no sweat.Our business consultants spend less time on contracts and more time nurturing relationships with merchants.”

ERICA GEILVice President, Global Engineering Operations

Groupon17

January 2017 | Your signature move

Electronic signature technology can help you avoid stoppages that can occur when you wait for legal approvals of contracts or nondisclosure agreements. These obstacles can really slow things down, but e-signatures let you maintain your momentum.

Today, e-signatures are legally binding in nearly every industrialized nation. In 2000, the United States passed the Electronic Signatures in Global and National Commerce (ESIGN) Act, which granted electronic signatures the same legal status as handwritten signatures throughout the United States.18 In the EU, the Electronic Identification and Trust Services (eIDAS), regulation, took effect in 2016, establishing a consistent legal framework for the recognition of digital IDs and electronic signatures across all of the EU.19 These, and other laws like them around the world, recognize electronic signatures and make them legal and enforceable in a court of law as long as the processes are designed and implemented in accordance with a few specific requirements. Today’s best e-signature systems are designed to meet these requirements.

For e-signatures to be legal, a signer’s identity needs to be verified. A range of methods can be used to authenticate the identity of participants. “Standard” e-signatures use email authentication, paired with a secure signing process and audit trail, while “enhanced” signatures require an additional phone PIN or password. High-security digital signatures use certificate-based digital IDs issued by trusted service providers. And just as with a handwritten signature, a signer must show clear intention to electronically sign an agreement—usually an easy requirement to satisfy. For example, signers can show their intention by using a mouse to draw their signature, typing their name, or clicking a button clearly labeled “I Accept,” or something similar.20

Sophisticated e-signature platforms can automatically generate audit trails that track every step of the signature process, which are encrypted, digitally sealed, tamper evident, and stored securely so that they can be used in court to help prove who signed a document and when they signed it.21

4. Legally binding. Professionally LIBERATING.

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Breaches in security can bring your business to a standstill. E-signature platforms can provide more security than a file cabinet, helping you avoid safekeeping snags while keeping your operations moving at a steady pace. But not all solutions are the same. To be sure your data and documents are secure—at rest and in transit—look for the highest level security certifications, such as ISO 27001, SOC 2 Type 2, and PCI DSS. These let you know the solution meets the most rigorous security standards.

Kantar IT Partnership, a global IT solution provider, uses an e-signature solution to protect data integrity and add transparency to their document processes. For example, the company recently established a rule requiring invoices to be sent directly to the person who generated the purchase order to help ensure that delivered services met expectations.

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“Without an e-signature platform, this would have been practically impossible due to the challenges of tracking invoices,” says Gemma Gervasini, finance manager for Kantar ITP’s European operations. Also, to improve the transparency of their approval process, the accounts payable team received an approval matrix with the e-signatures of all employees who had signing authority through their e-signature platform. Because e-signatures are more consistent than physical ones, they can confirm identification more quickly and reliably.22

5. Secure data at the SPEED of business.

11January 2017 | Your signature move

When choosing an e-signature platform, remember to look for:Fulfill your digital destiny with an e-signature solution.To become a truly digital business, it’s time to remove the last remaining roadblocks from your workflow and fire on all cylinders with electronic signatures. Today, no one wants to deal with complicated paper-based forms. And everyone expects a great experience on every device. Every interaction, every touchpoint affects how customers and employees perceive your brand. When your business meets and exceeds customer expectations by giving them what they want and need exactly when they need it— with as fluid and simple of a process as possible— the strength of your brand soars. Adopting electronic signatures in your workflow means making business quicker and easier for everyone. It means speedy, seamless, streamlined signing processes that keep your customers happy—and loyal.

• A trusted vendor with a proven success rate. Choose a strong enterprise-level platform that’s investing in digital transformation and meeting the needs of the modern, mobile customer.

• An interface that’s easy to learn and use, implement, and integrate with existing workplace software. Not all integrated solutions are created equal.

• Legal compliance. Requirements can vary based on your country laws or regulatory landscape. Look for vendors that have a deep understanding of the laws and can assure you their systems will comply with your specific requirements.

• Top-rated security standards. Your solution should keep your data and documents safe wherever they go.

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Ever since we invented the PDF, we’ve been focused on developing secure digital documents that make it easier for enterprises to accelerate and advance their workflows. Today, we process more than six billion digital and electronic signature

ADOBE can help.transactions each year for global businesses including Diners Club International, Royal Dutch Airlines, and NetApp. A conscientious investment in R&D allows us to better help you throughout the entire digital document lifecycle.

Learn more: https://acrobat.adobe.com/us/en/sign.html

1 “Business transformation through smarter document workflows,” IDC InfoBrief, Adobe, April 2016, https://acrobat.adobe.com/content/dam/doc-cloud/en/pdfs/landing/adobe-digital-transformation.pdf.

2 Ibid.

3 “Telefónica, continuous HR process improvement,” Adobe Customer Story, April 2016, http://www.adobe.com/content/dam/Adobe/en/customer-success/pdfs/telefonica-case-study.pdf.

4 “LeasePlan, better service through transparency and speed,” Adobe Customer Story, April 2016, http://www.adobe.com/content/dam/Adobe/en/customer-success/pdfs/leaseplan-case-study.pdf.

5 “KLM efficiencies soar worldwide,” Adobe Customer Story, April 2016, http://www.adobe.com/content/dam/Adobe/en/customer-success/pdfs/klm-case-study.pdf.

6 “Business transformation through smarter document workflows,” IDC InfoBrief, Adobe, April 2016.

7 “Foursquare gains talent through innovative technology,” Adobe Customer Story, April 2016, https://www.adobe.com/content/dam/Adobe/en/customer-success/pdfs/foursquare-case-study.pdf.

8 Ibid.

Adobe and the Adobe logo are either registered trademarks or trademarks of Adobe Systems Incorporated in the United States and/or other countries. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners.

© 2017 Adobe Systems Incorporated. All rights reserved. Printed in the USA.

9 “Business transformation through smarter document workflows,” IDC InfoBrief, Adobe, April 2016.

10 “ESIGN Act: A Well-Established Law Enabling Business Transformation Today,” Adobe Document Cloud White Paper, July 2016, https://acrobat.adobe.com/content/dam/doc-cloud/en/pdfs/Adobe_E-Sign_Act_WhitePaper_ue.pdf.

11 “Ceridian transforms sales experiences,” Adobe Customer Story, April 2016, https://www.adobe.com/content/dam/Adobe/en/customer-success/pdfs/ceridian-case-study.pdf.

12 “Speed signing processes with workflow automation,” Adobe Sign Solution Brief, April 2016, https://acrobat.adobe.com/content/dam/doc-cloud/en/pdfs/adobe-workflow-automation.pdf.

13 “Accelerate your business with trusted, legal electronic signatures from Adobe,” Adobe Sign Solution Brief, April 2016, https://acrobat.adobe.com/content/dam/doc-cloud/en/pdfs/Adobe-Document-Cloud-eSign-Services-Solution-Brief-ue.pdf.

14 “NetApp, going further faster,” Adobe Customer Story, April 2016, https://www.adobe.com/content/dam/Adobe/en/customer-success/pdfs/netapp-e-signatures-case-study.pdf.

15 “Groupon: Unbeatable deals for strong growth,” Adobe Customer Story, April 2016, https://www.adobe.com/content/dam/Adobe/en/customer-success/pdfs/groupon-case-study.pdf.

16 “Ceridian transforms sales experiences,” Adobe Customer Story, April 2016.

17 “Groupon: Unbeatable deals for strong growth,” Adobe Customer Story, April 2016, https://www.adobe.com/content/dam/Adobe/en/customer-success/pdfs/groupon-case-study.pdf.

18 “ESIGN Act: A Well-Established Law Enabling Business Transformation Today,” Adobe Document Cloud White Paper, July 2016.

19 “Overview of electronic signature law in the EU,” Adobe Sign White Paper, April 2016, https://acrobat.adobe.com/content/dam/doc-cloud/en/pdfs/overview-of-electronic-signature-law-in-the-EU.pdf.

20 “ESIGN Act: A Well-Established Law Enabling Business Transformation Today,” Adobe Document Cloud White Paper, July 2016.

21 Ibid.

22 “Kantar IT Partnership, bridging the globe with technology,” Adobe Customer Story, April 2016, http://www.adobe.com/content/dam/Adobe/en/customer-success/pdfs/kantar-itp-case-study.pdf.