In 1993, AssurX began offering quality, risk management and regulatory compliance solutions and services to improve quality, reduce costs and increase the bottom line for customers, suppliers and business partners. In 1998, AssurX was the first to offer a Web-based solution, leveraging Internet technology. Since this time, AssurX has achieved rapid growth, partnering with a long list of Fortune 500 clients.

Business Challenge 

With sales and customers scattered around the world, AssurX was feeling the pain of having to get contracts and documents signed from multiple locations throughout North America and Europe. Many times, contracts had to be faxed three, four and sometimes five times in order to get all required signatures. This repeated faxing often led to muddled, unreadable documents by the end of the process. Further, some documents were falling behind schedule or slipping through the cracks. AssurX executives recognized that this inefficient, time- consuming paper-based process could hamper its growth rate. “Sending final documents to customers took extra time and money and was often delayed,” said John Moroney, vice president of Sales at AssurX. “We have many people who have to sign off on a document, which was very cumbersome via faxing and emailing. We were wasting days chasing down paperwork, which led to situations where customers were waiting for their software or services to be delivered because all the paperwork hadn’t been completed.”

DocuSign Solution 

After researching a variety of options, AssurX chose DocuSign because of its compliance and reporting features, which are critical to the QA and regulatory processes.

Results 

“The compliance aspect is important in our business,” said Moroney. “DocuSign provides an audit trail behind every event, tracking the history of who has reviewed and signed the document. DocuSigned contracts can’t get lost or buried. And, because DocuSign is a third party to the agreement, its eSignature service adds credibility to the signing process.” In addition, AssurX found that DocuSign addressed a key issue with regard to their contracts – getting all the needed signatures, in exactly the right order, no matter time zone or location. This document signing routing order (or sequential signing) is a favored feature of AssurX. Many AssurX contracts need to be signed in a particular order, for example starting with sales, then the customer, then engineering and finally order entry. “DocuSign is the only technology we found that addressed this key issue,” said Moroney. Using DocuSign’s eSignature service has greatly improved the workflow process and cash flow within AssurX, as well as increased the speed at which the company does business. “One key benefit is that each document is automatically dateand time-stamped, which provides us with a full audit trail and shows us who has reviewed and signed the contract,” said Moroney. Since AssurX began using DocuSign, the time needed to return a fully signed contract has been reduced from three to five days, down to an average of just one. “DocuSign has made the process of engaging with the customer smoother, and improved the sales team’s work,” said Moroney. “It’s an easy process to put the contract into DocuSign, direct it to those who need to sign it, and it’s auto-pilot after that. DocuSign has allowed us to deliver our software and services faster and meet our internal criteria for processing orders. It’s also improved our cash flow because orders are being established promptly.”