How AI and Automated Workflows Transform Procurement: Lessons from the YMCA of Greater Philadelphia
Procurement teams lose time and money due to manual contract intake, review, and approvals. By automating these workflows with Docusign, the YMCA of Greater Philadelphia routes 90% of requests through a single digital front door while slashing agreement review time by 50%.
Procurement is a critical, and sometimes chaotic, part of the business. Software renewal requests, supplier agreement reviews and approvals, and risk management are just a few of the responsibilities.
Lean teams on tight deadlines can’t afford inefficiencies like manual agreement intake, tracking, and storage. When procurement is bogged down, the business suffers.
The good news is that automation and AI can help streamline procurement processes by facilitating intake requests and renewals across the sourcing and negotiation lifecycle.
Deloitte and Docusign research shows that implementing automated workflows and AI helps procurement teams see a 33% average decrease in vendor spend and time savings of 36% opens in a new tab, with the largest savings in the review and risk evaluation stages of the agreement lifecycle.
Shifting to automated intake and approval workflows and an AI-powered repository enables procurement teams to act quickly and work more efficiently.
Why do procurement processes break down?
For decentralized organizations, manual contract processes are more than just slow—they introduce liability.
Consider the YMCA of Greater Philadelphia. With 15 branch locations, dozens of childcare and camp sites, and more than 4,000 employees, their small procurement team is tasked with massive volume.
The YMCA connects people to healthy living through community-focused services, wellness, and childcare.
“We realized our procurement process was sadly disorganized and as such it represented additional liability,” says Mark Morrison, Senior Director of IT at the YMCA. “We’re already a very lean-staffed organization, so we really couldn't afford to have any waste or excess.”
This friction added both risk and expense to a complex, decentralized organization.
“The biggest hurdle was around streamlining and managing the risk and expense of all the procurement operations. That was what drove us to get started with Docusign IAM.”
How can AI and automation streamline procurement?
The YMCA of Greater Philadelphia uses Docusign Intelligent Agreement Management (IAM) to bring its thousands of agreements into a secure, AI-powered repository and automate internal approvals and renewal tracking.
Let’s take a closer look at how the YMCA transformed each step of its procurement process using the Docusign IAM platform:
Step 1: Request intake
Spreadsheets, emails, and hallway conversations. In other words, “I don't think there was really a process at all,” Morrison says. “It would hit people's inboxes and shared mailboxes. We had literally hundreds of different people acting as their own intake desks. Without a front door, there was no single place to manage or review them.”
With Agreement Desk, an AI agent scans all incoming emails and attachments and recommends the appropriate request type. It then pre-populates the correct form, and the entire process takes less than a minute. The procurement team now has a complete intake pre-filled with the correct information.
“Now we've got that single front door and a trusted internal email for all requests,” Morrison says. “We were able to tailor the intake form to our core process and differentiate by our various program areas, making it really efficient.”
Step 2: Request management
To manage the high volume of daily requests and minimize “shadow purchasing” outside standard operating procedures, procurement needed a frictionless, efficient process and a single source of truth.
Agreement Desk’s dashboard provides a one-stop view of all requests in the queue. Team members can now easily view request status and prioritization. Then, they can choose to make updates manually or use workflow automation to handle the heavy lifting. Agreement Desk tracks all activity and creates an audit log with timestamps. And requesters get automatic notifications, so they know procurement is actively working on their request.
This elevated request management process brings a new sense of calm and professionalism to the operation.
Step 3: Negotiation and review
Most of the YMCA’s contracts are on third-party paper, so constant back-and-forth redlining and manual reviews were simply a fact of life.
“It just was so messy and inconsistent,” Morrison says. “A lot of our agreements would have to go out for external review, which added five or seven days to that process. Because we’re a lean organization, that was really expensive and time-consuming.”
Agreement Desk has a powerful AI-Assisted Review feature, which enables procurement to run a custom playbook against every agreement. AI flags every clause that doesn’t align with the company’s standards, suggests edits, and justifies the flags. The team simply reviews the suggestions and clicks once to accept or reject the changes. Then the latest version is saved back into Agreement Desk.
“The playbooks have made our team members the experts,” Morrison says. “We’re seeing at least a 50% time reduction on review, and fewer reviews need to be sent to our external partners. We’re saving both time and money.”
Step 4: Approvals and execution
The YMCA struggled to “handle the yes” due to manual effort across multiple parties.
“Because the process was so vague, we had a tight policy, but no real standard operating procedure to implement it,” Morrison says.
Now, they use Agreement Desk to create a workflow to automatically approve contracts exceeding a certain amount. The platform creates an AI summary of the contract, ensures all approvals are completed, sends the agreement for signature, and then securely saves the final agreement in Agreement Manager.
“We've finally unified everything into one system,” Morrison says, “We’ve been working with Workflow Builder to route approvals automatically based on contract type, program, area, and value. And we're finally able to be proactive on renewals.”
“It’s been a total game-changer for us.”
- 99%
of agreement requests now enter through a single centralized digital intake process
- 50%
less time spent on initial agreement reviews thanks to AI tools
- 1,000
agreements managed annually
In recognition of its outstanding results in implementing IAM, the YMCA of Greater Philadelphia has been named a 2026 Global Customer Award winner in the Champions of Social Impact category. The award recognizes organizations that drive sustainability, uplift communities, and create meaningful, lasting impact.
Looking forward: The era of proactive agreement management
While immediate operational challenges or expenses usually drive an organization toward transformation, the true value of IAM lies in how it helps build a core, self-reinforcing strategic asset.
“We’ve learned a lot through this process,” Morrison says. “This platform helps you understand your own operations, and it’s flexible and agile, so we can iterate and build in different pieces. That's important because you're much more likely to get it done. “
Morrison believes change management is an important part of implementing any new process or system. To help manage this, he recommends identifying a champion in each operational area.
“If you line up a champion in one area to help solve one piece of the puzzle, it starts to reinforce the value to the other parts of the organization. It begins to build on itself.”
The key is to choose a single process and start there.
“I would encourage everyone to get started. The request component is where most of us can get quick value from a procurement perspective, but it's an enjoyable journey. So just go for it!”
Docusign IAM is the agreement platform your business needs
