Revolutionizing Public Sector Procurement Capabilities with SAP

Effective procurement strategies form the foundation for government agency IT modernization. However, before understanding where agencies can modernize, it’s critical to look at the end-to-end processes and components that make up all procurement efforts.

The procurement cycle can be complicated, involving everything from solution sourcing and RFP management to contracting, purchasing, vendor management and payments, and receiving goods.

Agreements are required to advance many of the most critical steps in the procurement process. However, the workflows associated with these agreements often still require manual steps, which can increase the risk of contract value leakage, lengthen procurement administrative lead time and slow down the acquisition of the right solutions for overall IT modernization.

To avoid the consequences of manual procurement steps, system integrations are critical. Integrating with existing technology platforms drives digital transformation and can also improve ROI across the procurement solution ecosystem.

Expanding DocuSign and SAP’s strategic partnership

Since 2015, DocuSign and SAP have partnered to help their customers, including many of the world's leading organizations, integrate their technologies and accelerate their agreement processes.

Through continued investments, DocuSign has expanded integrations across SAP Lines of Business solutions to drive value and collaboration for our shared customers. This has led to continuous innovation and alignment to deliver customer-centric innovations that create smarter, easier and more trusted government agreement processes.

Automate and streamline procurement workflows with DocuSign CLM and SAP Ariba

SAP Ariba is a global leader in providing cloud-based procurement, spend management and supply chain services that enable suppliers and buyers to connect and do business globally. As a part of our continued investments to innovate and expand integrations, DocuSign CLM seamlessly integrates with SAP Ariba to help drive consistency across your agency.

DocuSign CLM streamlines the contract lifecycle for complex agreements with document generation, redlining, real-time negotiation, automatic routing to the right stakeholder to sign, drag-and-drop workflows and powerful search. Harnessing AI-driven contract analytics, DocuSign CLM also allows you to quickly understand what’s in your supplier agreements by searching, filtering and comparing contracts across your portfolio—streamlining the negotiation process before you sign.

For the fourth year in a row, DocuSign has been named a Leader in the Gartner^® Magic Quadrant^™ for Contract Life Cycle Management—most recently in 2023, when DocuSign was positioned highest on the ability to execute axis.  As a FedRAMP authorized, StateRAMP authorized and IL4 provisional authorized solution, DocuSign CLM can deliver a secure and trusted way to transform procurement processes across the public sector.

Enable faster service delivery through digital agreements

System integrations are critical to driving digitization and improving ROI across the procurement solution ecosystem. In a recent DocuSign survey of procurement professionals, 95% of departments feel they’re not fully capitalizing on all the capabilities of their technology. In addition, 44% consider the lack of integration with other systems a critical pain point in their procurement ecosystem. Without a connection between the two systems, users often resort to manual data entry, which causes them to lose time moving between systems that lack a single source of truth. This can also lead to potentially costly mistakes due to incomplete or out-of-date information.

Integrating CLM with an ERP like SAP Ariba ensures agency procurement teams get a better return on investment from both tools while introducing more automation and less friction in their source-to-pay (S2P) process. DocuSign CLM for SAP Ariba drives consistency and value for public sector agencies, helping:

• Save time: Avoid moving back and forth between systems with automated data-sharing capabilities.
• Reduce errors: Stop relying on manual data entry with automatic and continuous contract and project metadata updates.
• Centralize your CLM repository: Share CLM data and contract links with Ariba, which keeps contracting data in DocuSign CLM and procurement data in SAP Ariba.
• Easily establish connection: Establish a quick, secure connection with SAP Ariba via the CLM Connections page, reducing implementation time and accelerating time to value.

With DocuSign CLM integrated with SAP Ariba, public sector users can automatically share data across systems—generating more efficiency and fewer errors throughout their contracting and sourcing process. This allows government procurement teams to achieve digital transformation and IT modernization goals.