Wednesday afternoon, DataBank had the pleasure of co-hosting a webinar with DocuSign on their integration with OnBase, a top-notch enterprise content management system, and the advantages this offers to the government vertical. DocuSign is a leading provider of a Digital Transaction Management solution that allows organizations to obtain signatures completely electronically, reducing costs as well as the time spent on the signature process.
With their many paper-intensive processes, government entities find great value in the ability to sign contracts and other agreements with a few simple clicks, eliminating the need for printing, postage, re-keying data, and the associated costs. Constituents also get to reap the benefits of electronic signatures when documents are sent to them from organizations with a DocuSign subscription. And since both OnBase and DocuSign are available on mobile platforms, this integration can be used in the field as well as in the office.
DocuSign has a long track record of saving users substantial amounts of time and money. Butte County uses the service for their Secure Electronic Search Warrants and saves $16,000 dollars a year, cutting down their average signature process time by 2 hours. In an industry where any amount of time can save lives, those 2 hours are crucial. Washington State has been using DocuSign in one of their license and permit processes for 6 months and has already processed 13,000 forms and saved a whopping $600,000. From a contract management standpoint, Washington State’s Department of Family and Children Services is saving $70,000 annually, and Nevada’s Department of Transportation has cut down their average processing time from 24.4 days to 4.8 days.
There’s still a huge opportunity for many organizations to benefit from DocuSign, as can be seen from our poll results. Even though a majority of attendees had used electronic signatures before, 80% were still using pen and paper to sign documents at work, and more than half reported an inability to sign documents from their mobile device.
Although electronic signatures offers a lot to your business processes, security and legality is still a concern for many individuals. DocuSign is covered under both the Electronic Signatures in Global and National Commerce Act and the Uniform Electronic Transactions Act as a legal and enforceable signature in every state except Illinois, New York, and Washington (all three of those states have separate electronic signatures acts, under which DocuSign is also covered). According to a paper published by Ombud, electronic signatures actually give you more evidence than wet ink signatures do because of their many options available for authenticity and verification.
One of the perks of an OnBase integration is the easy access to an audit trail for every document. Detailed histories show by who and when the form was created, when it was uploaded into the DocuSign system, and when it was received. Every step of the signing process is recorded and available for you to review. OnBase users can also incorporate a background check as well contract expiration timers into the signing of their documents, conveniently giving them another layer of security and a list of any contracts that run out in 90, 60, or 30 days.
DocuSign is a valuable solution for any organization that deals with a heavy stream of contracts or other documents that require approval. The OnBase and DocuSign integration not only provides the standard ROI of saved money and time, but also improves upon security and compliance measures with thorough authentication protocols and detailed audit trails. If you’d like to view the whole webinar on our YouTube channel, click here. Or if you’d like to learn more about enterprise content management for government, read our case study below and find out how Seminole County cut their costs by 40 percent.
