Every day our Federal Government Contractors route documents to other parties for signature and for filling out information. One common need is signing NDAs and Teaming Agreements with partners/subcontractors. Typically, this is done manually using email. eSignature solutions have been around for more than 10 years but they still are not widely adopted. DocuSign is the leader in the market. Recently, Adobe Sign has been making inroads in the space. In this article we will talk about of the process and the convenience of routing R3 documents for eSignature using Adobe Sign.
The eSignature Flow
We like Adobe Sign because it can be natively integrated with our solutions. Adobe is the owner of the PDF format. This makes it just that little more convenient to get the job done.
Let’s look at the eSignature flow. We’ll assume your are in your R3 solution, like R3 Contract Management, and you want to route an NDA to get it signed by a partner. It flows like this:
- You open the NDA PDF document from the R3 contract record. It opens up directly into Adobe Acrobat Reader (the free version). You can do your eSignature right from there.
- You Request Signatures where you enter who you want to sign.
- You set up where you want them to sign and your blocks of information (such as signature, name, title, date).
- You Send and track progress.
- Signers get an email with a link to go and review, sign and/or fill in other fields. Adobe Sign tracks the progress and keeps you and the signers in the loop.
- When done, you get an email with the attached signed document.
- You then drag & drop the attached signed document or the full email into your R3 contract.
The nice thing with R3 and Adobe Sign is the convenience of steps 1 and 7 above. It is very seamless. There is no manual downloading or uploading of files. Adobe Sign also does a nice job of keeping everyone in the loop with emails and keeping track of who has done what throughout the process. Only the people that request the signatures need an account. External signers do not need an account.
To learn more about Adobe Sign click here. They are getting aggressive with pricing. A single user is $9/month. The Small Business package from 1-9 users it is $20/user/month. With the increased convenience and lower cost we may start seeing much higher adoption of eSignature in the market.