DocuSign Sightings: Ariba, DocuSign Partner to offer e-signatures on Business Docs

Sam Diaz, one of the senior editors at ZDNet recently wrote a blog post about DocuSign
He’s been trying to sell his DC area home for the past five months. This process has him and his wife signing and initialing a million (number exaggerated for effect) documents, some as long as 65 pages, with a signature and/or initial needed on each. ?
According to Sam, his real estate agent sent them as a PDF – print, sign, initial and fax back – in theory. In practice, things happened, like cutting off pages into the send, or faxing and refaxing because an initial was missing. Trying to scan the signed documents into a PDF didn’t really work either.  

Then Sam heard that Ariba, a company that offers spending and contract management services, and DocuSign had partnered. Sam could see the power behind the Ariba and DocuSign offering, noting that:  

 The Ariba-Docusign technology allows the sender to highlight the areas that need signatures and blocks the document from being sent back if there are signature lines that were accidentally overlooked. It allows the sender to track where the document is at any given moment, including who’s signed it and who hasn’t.  

DocuSign’s electronic signature and online contract execution has various levels of authentication:  

• Supported authentication methods: email, Access Code (PIN), ID Verify (KBA), OFAC, Age Verification, STAN PIN for student lenders
• 3rd party authentication tools that can be called in the signing instructions so that a recipient must pass one or several authentication steps before they sign.

All of which provide senders with the flexibility to automate DocuSign’s electronic signature and electronic contract execution services as needed. With document storage in the cloud and document signing happening in the Web browser, there’s no software to buy and the electronic signature and online contract execution services can scale with customer needs. The Ariba and DocuSign partnership created a system designed for “a very strict enterprise class rigor.” In a business environment when documents need to be signed before checks can be cut, turning around documents makes a big difference. Documents can turn around in a day, not days. Business can move faster.   

Sam didn’t address the operational savings that come from automating the contracting process with electronic signatures and supply chain contract processes. With Ariba and DocuSign, you could realize significant operational savings with no more long distance fax (and fax-back) charges and no more overnight document shipping charges.    

Sam writes: 

 Or Sam can just let his agent know about DocuSign and our electronic signature and online contract execution offerings for real estate professionals. Agents using DocuSign cut costs and enhance their customers’ satisfaction.   

A year ago, I might have had some reservations about Web-based documents and digital signatures. But having been through the hassle of trying to sign long legal contracts, I would have welcomed the chance to take this document-signing process online…When it comes time for me to buy a house down the road, I’ll be sure to ask my agent if he or she is using electronic signatures. If not, I might just look for another agent.

In business, contracts are signed everyday – purchase orders, vendor agreements, financial documents. Many of them require multiple signatures – which means that they’re handled by many different people, from mailroom employees to admin assistants to executives and even the Fed-Ex driver. And then, when they get back to original sender, pages might be missing or, even worse, some pages come back missing a signature.