Clark County realizes the value of Adobe Acrobat Sign to deliver outstanding services to residents, visitors, and businesses

By taking advantage of Adobe Acrobat Sign and integrations with Microsoft 365, the county created reliable digital workflows that keep services running.

From the bright lights of the Las Vegas Strip to the awe-inspiring vistas of Red Rock Canyon, Clark County is home to some of the world’s most popular tourist attractions. The county’s 2.4 million residents support a dynamic economy that hosts more than 42 million tourists every year. Behind the established tourism economy is a growing technology sector, with the county gaining a reputation as a hotspot for innovative startups.

For CIO Nadia Hansen, technology and innovation also play an important role in helping Clark County meets the diverse needs of Southern Nevada — from providing effective and fast services for millions of residents and visitors, to promoting sustainable administration that protects the area’s valuable natural resources.

“Clark County is unique given its size and diversity,” says Hansen. “We have 10,000 employees across 140 locations, and we collaborate closely with state and city agencies. We pride ourselves on providing outstanding services, and technology makes that level of service possible.”

As part of the county’s digital transformation, Clark County deployed Adobe Acrobat Sign, the e-signature application within Adobe Document Cloud. By taking advantage of Acrobat Sign and integrations with Microsoft 365, the county created reliable digital workflows that keep services running in any type of remote, in-person, or hybrid work environment.

Getting community involved in digital transformation

Clark County started its digital transformation with a massive overhaul of its website. The web team wanted to make it fast and easy for people to get the services that they need either through a computer or mobile phone, minimizing the need to visit an office in-person.

“One important thing that we did was involve the community in the design,” adds Hansen. “We asked people for the top reasons they visit the website and then tried to determine how fast and easy it was for them to find that information.”

The updated website was instrumental in keeping county operations running during the COVID-19 pandemic. With employees working remotely and travel limited, people appreciated how they could use the new website to look up information and download forms from any device. However, signing and submitting forms could still be challenging. For many forms, people had to print them, fill them out by hand, and then scan and attach them to an email. For processes requiring multiple levels of signatures and approvals, such as purchase orders, having to constantly print and scan documents wasted a lot of time and paper.

“Electronic signatures were definitely on my technology roadmap, but the pandemic bumped it to the top of the list,” says Hansen. “If we wanted to minimize contact and hassle in a remote environment, we needed e-signatures. We looked at other solutions including DocuSign, but we decided on Adobe Acrobat Sign for the competitive pricing, strong functionality, and integration as the preferred e-signature solution for Microsoft.”

IT as a technology testing ground

Clark County purchased Acrobat Sign in the summer of 2020 and the IT department immediately started working on pilots within the group. “We like to be the ones that test out technology deployments for the county,” says Hansen. “When we pilot projects in IT, we gain a greater understanding of all the little tricks and tips in a new technology. That allows us to deliver strong ongoing support and maintenance once we roll it out to more people.”

IT deals with stacks of paperwork every day, from processing paper invoices for the county’s 300 technology vendors to processing network and remote access user agreements for the county’s 10,000 employees. Some of these processes require multiple signatures — IT invoices, for example, often need multiple approvals before being passed through the Finance department and delivered to the comptroller for final processing. An IT admin collected, tracked, and forwarded every piece of paper by hand.

With Acrobat Sign the entire process is completely automated. Admins can check an audit trail on any signed documents to instantly know exactly who signed a document, when, and where. The digital workflows reduce paper waste by 75 percent, and invoices are signed in hours instead of days.

“The time savings and sustainability benefits with Adobe Acrobat Sign are clear,” says Hansen. “But the other real benefit is that it shows people how even seemingly small changes can make processes so much faster, easier, and more accurate. We’re encouraging people to think creatively about what else they can take beyond the status quo.”

Microsoft integration speeds adoption

Just a few months after the IT department started expanding the use of Acrobat Sign, Clark County was already processing 700 documents per month. Within a year, Hansen predicts that number will rise to 30,000 each month. Budget and Finance, Risk Management, Parks and Recreation, Purchasing, and the Comptroller’s office are just some of the teams that quickly adopted Acrobat Sign. The District Attorney Family Services (DAFS) uses Acrobat Sign to more securely sign and file conflict of interest documents involving child welfare cases. The automated, digital workflow minimizes the number of times a document exchanges hands, helping keep sensitive information even more secure.

One of the keys to the fast expansion is the integration with Microsoft 365. “We wanted the e-signatures to be incredibly easy to use to encourage adoption,” says Hansen. “The Microsoft Outlook add-in makes it so that people don’t even need to leave their most-used application — their email inbox— to add, track, or sign documents securely. And the same can be said for the Adobe Acrobat Sign integration within Microsoft Teams, which groups use all day to collaborate and meet.”

Employees can also use the integration to create signable documents directly from Microsoft Word or PowerPoint files. This makes routing documents or sharing files for review much easier. Employee Performance Evaluations forms are routed to all parties before being pulled into the employee database. While it typically took a minimum of three days to sign evaluations, Hansen says that in one instance that time was reduced to just 10 minutes.

Enhancing citizen services with digital workflows

Acrobat Sign isn’t just for internal processes. Clark County also uses the digital workflows to better serve citizens. The Public Administrator fully digitized Next of Kin declarations for easy access and simple submission. Using Acrobat Sign a next of kin can now fill out, sign, and submit forms from any device, anywhere in the world. Grieving family members spend less time dealing with administrative paperwork and more time focusing on themselves and their loved ones during a difficult time.

Clark County plans to encourage even more public facing uses that will allow residents to complete and submit paperwork in one easy step. With Acrobat Sign, added features such as required fields, drop-down boxes, tooltips, and auto-fill fields make it easy to complete digital documents. This makes life simpler for residents, while reducing the time that employees spend checking forms and following up for missing information.

“The pandemic underscored the need for accessible, contactless channels to keep county operations running, but electronic workflows were always part of our digital transformation plan due to their productivity and sustainability benefits,” says Hansen. “Adobe Acrobat Sign offers advantages to everyone: office workers, remote workers, and the public. It’s helping us transition to a hybrid work model and provide even better services to the residents, visitors, and businesses that make Clark County such as great place to be.”

Contact us to talk about how we can help your organization use e-signature with Acrobat Sign.