Making the Most of Adobe Sign’s Workflow Designer

How to spread the goodness and ease of using Adobe Sign Workflow Designer throughout your organization.

Your organization may already be using Adobe Sign and seeing faster sales cycles, reduced per-transaction costs, and signatures received 21 times faster than with traditional methods. But there’s more you could and should be doing with Adobe Sign — including using Adobe Sign Workflow Designer.

Adobe Sign visual design tool

The Adobe Sign Workflow Designer helps you easily automate every task in a document workflow from start to finish. It’s a highly intuitive process anchored in a guided send experience that increases speed, reduces errors, and minimizes work.

That’s just the beginning. Workflow Designer has three main components, each designed to help streamline workflows:

1. Map out recipients and routing sequences, determining who should receive the document and the routing order for inputting information, signing, and approving it.

2. Upload an agreement in PDF or Word, then add any additional form fields as needed.
3. Define workflow details such as emails or reminders to send to participants, what type of authentication is required, or the security that should be attached to each document.

Each of these components comes together in Adobe Sign, creating an end-to-end experience that streamlines and simplifies the approval and signature process.

Using Workflow Designer

A good example of when Workflow Designer can add lots of value is in the case of getting a standard non-disclosure agreement (NDA) signed and executed.

Almost every company uses an NDA at some point. Maybe HR wants to discuss proprietary information with a vendor partner, or a new hire will be privy to sensitive customer data. In these and countless other cases, an NDA needs to be signed by both parties — and often signed quickly so critical information can be shared.

Using Adobe Sign, the initiating party — in this case, the HR department — identifies and maps out all NDA recipients. For example, the legal department will be the first recipient, ensuring forms are up to date and accurate. Once reviewed and approved, legal will sign off.

From there, the NDA will travel to the internal stakeholder — the person hiring the vendor or managing the new hire. They, too, will review the NDA and ensure it’s moving through the approval process as it should. The final recipient is the accepting party — the vendor, or the hire in this scenario. This is all established within Adobe Sign, ensuring a seamless routing and review process.

Throughout this process, additional form fields can be added, using auto form field recognition powered by Adobe Sensei, our artificial intelligence (AI) and machine-learning technology. Because the template is integrated in the Adobe Sign template library, stakeholders can make changes or suggestions as documents route, keeping projects moving forward while ensuring everyone has an opportunity to weigh in.

The next step is creating the workflow itself. This is a very simple process, with a complete visual outline of the workflow and information required, all available within Adobe Sign. To set your workflow, you’ll address:

• Workflow info
• Agreement info
• Recipients and the order they need to sign or approve the agreement
• Emails sent during the process, including who receives which communications
• Documents specifying what’s part of the workflow
• Sender input fields, which defines where the sender can add information in fields. This information is merged with the document before it’s sent for approval.

Once you’ve filled out all of the sections for the workflow inflow, click “activate” to make the workflow account available to all groups.

Importance of Workflow

Workflow Designer provides users with a powerful way to expand Adobe Sign usage and access across an organization. And, because Adobe Sign is easy to use and can be tailored to fit different departments and their needs, it’s easy to bring others into the process, building trust and driving efficiencies.

In that vein, it’s easy to connect the dots among these key organizational stakeholders considering Adobe Sign integrates with so many leading business solutions you and your organization may already be using (like Salesforce, Microsoft, and Workday). Once connected, use Workflow Designer to tackle advanced workflows with complex logic and rules, addressing your most challenging needs.

Want to learn more about maximizing Adobe Sign for your business? Adobe offers monthly virtual events designed to spark conversation and collaboration, while helping individual users and enterprises get the most out of their investments. Contact your client success manager to sign up.

For more information on how to better maximize your investment, read about Adobe Sign on our blog.