By Nikita Saharia Chaturvedi
Adobe recently unveiled Adobe Document Cloud as a contemporary way for people to cope with documents they care about at office and home. Unknowingly everybody takes into use an enormous amount of paper in their routine lives in numerous tasks ranging from school permission slips, health insurance forms and more importantly procurement’s complicated documents and contracts. “So, at Adobe, we set out to change how people manage all that paper,” Conrad Smith, Senior Director of Global Procurement at Adobe, tells My Purchasing Center in a new podcast on Adobe Document Cloud, and how it affects procurement professionals.
Document Cloud is built around the latest version of Acrobat—Adobe Acrobat DC—and is designed to act as a repository for all documents. It lets people create, review, approve, and track documents across all their devices—at their desks and on their phones. It also possesses a feature called eSign; an e-signatures offering, so people can sign and send documents from any device, on the fly.
Moving on to the latest buzz–e-signatures, a partnership with Dropbox, and innovation delivered to subscribers of Acrobat DC. While talking about this tremendous initiative with My Purchasing Center Smith said that Adobe has introduced some significant new capabilities for subscribers. “We made eSign more powerful than ever, with features like workflow automation for business processes, such as high limit procurement card requests and approvals,” Smith said.
As he sees it, it’s quite helpful when people sign an agreement with their own name or signature as it feels like more of a commitment to follow the rules than when they simply click ‘accept’ or some other button. Adobe has also incorporated digital signatures into eSign, which allows users to verify a document’s authenticity and integrity. It allows users to confirm the identity of each signer and that the document hasn’t been altered in transit.
Talking specifically about Adobe’s milestone partnership with Dropbox to make it easier for users to work with PDF files in Dropbox, Smith said: “We’ve integrated our applications so that users can access and act on PDF files stored in Dropbox directly from within Acrobat and Acrobat Reader, and save them back automatically to their Dropbox accounts. And Dropbox users can open, edit and save PDF documents in the Adobe apps directly from Dropbox services and apps. It’s desktop only for now, but we’ll be adding these capabilities and more to iPhones and iPads soon, and Android devices next year.”
Another benefit of an Acrobat DC subscription is new innovations and enhancements for subscribers on a rolling basis. As promised, Adobe delivered features like tabbed viewing, more “Photoshop magic” with camera-to-PDF conversion, and more to Acrobat DC subscribers. This initiative of Adobe means that procurement can now easily move from a pen, ink and paper process to a fully integrated contract process. Almost every person or business involved in drafting and implementing contract documents reaches a point where they convert it to PDF and send it. Inevitably it’s printed, signed, scanned and emailed back, where it might be printed, signed, scanned and archived. Now procurement can skip all that administrative headache and work the whole process electronically. “
Smith exclaimed, “For us at Adobe, we implemented eSign at the tail end of our contracting process re-engineering. We invested huge efforts to take as many days as possible out of the process. We had spent almost a year sorting through various challenges and had cut the contract process in half. When we shifted to eSign, we were able to remove 10-20% from the process time.” Conclusively, the new document cloud is completely revamped and includes some very cool efficiency tools like ‘send and track’ and eSign to name a few.
Acrobat is a great app and fill and sign allows quick and easy transition from whatever paper you might have to a quick/easy electronic version than can easily be emailed to your kid’s teacher, coach, or whoever sent that paper form. If procurement teams aren’t already using electronic signatures they are missing a great opportunity to quickly improve their operations with minimal cost.
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