Sika brings innovation and sustainability to global business processes
Sika is known for its leading position in the development and production of systems and products for bonding, sealing, damping, reinforcing, and protection in the building sector and automotive industry. Sika solutions enable sustainable construction and transportation, with subsidiaries in 100 countries around the world, while manufacturing in over 300 factories.
The IT team at Sika — including David Ferrer, project manager for Web Applications, and Peter Simon, team head of Web & Digital Solutions — takes pride in how their team brings the spirit of innovation to processes across the company.
“I’m passionate about changing and improving the way people work,” explains Simon. “If I can make their everyday processes more efficient, then I can give them more time to focus on what’s most important to them, whether that’s training employees, talking to vendors, or developing new chemical additives that will revolutionize the construction industry.”
Working with Adobe Acrobat Sign, Sika gains a tool that teams can use to digitize any document, from service and purchase orders to NDAs and work contracts. “The demand for Adobe Acrobat Sign was far beyond what we expected,” says Simon. “We’ve had 3,000 transactions in the first six months of deploying Adobe Acrobat Sign, with about a 30 percent increase every month. Once people see how Adobe Acrobat Sign increases their efficiency, they’re more than happy to go digital.”
Flexibility to adapt to any business use
Sika has long worked with best-in-class Adobe applications, including Adobe Creative Cloud, Adobe Experience Cloud, and Adobe Acrobat. When Sika began looking at e-signature solutions, Acrobat Sign surfaced as the best choice as it’s backed by the same trusted Adobe brand.
“Adobe Acrobat Sign has all of the functionality that we need, including strong integrations with Microsoft and many other solutions,” says Simon. “The ease of use was also critical for us to support adoption across 25,000 employees. It’s so intuitive that we didn’t need to spend a lot of time on training.”
Within the first six months of the integration of Acrobat Sign, Sika has already saved resources globally by eliminating printing, mailing, and manual labor costs associated with paper-based processes. More than 800 users currently use Acrobat Sign to create seamless digital workflows for approvals, contracts, and all types of paperwork approval processes.
Increased visibility and faster approvals, globally
Portugal
Teams in Portugal use Acrobat Sign to process many different types of customer-facing paperwork, including sales orders, warranties, and product returns. Customer service teams can quickly initiate credit for product returns through Acrobat Sign. With greater visibility into where documents are — whether they’ve been viewed or signed by approvers — customer service teams can quickly and confidently reassure customers that the return is being reviewed. Credit is processed faster, leading to an even higher degree of customer focus.
The sales team has been able to considerably reduce the time to process orders. Sika can now review, approve and sign sales requests in less than 24 hours. Portuguese sales representatives can spend more time on adding greater value to their customers, thanks to the automated templates and workflows created in Acrobat Sign.
Saudi Arabia
In Saudi Arabia, teams take advantage of the templates and workflows to automate a wide variety of day-to-day administrative tasks, from purchase orders, price discounts, employee vacation requests and business travel reimbursements. Acrobat Sign also accelerates approvals when stakeholders are traveling or are working in different cities, leading to faster decision-making processes.
With the sales team using Acrobat Sign, agreements can be completed in under two hours instead of taking up to four days. This gives the sales representatives the ability to complete more sales quotes for potential customers, leading to greater overall sales growth for the company.
Expanding adoption with support from the top
Interest in Acrobat Sign is growing rapidly, partially due to strong support from internal advocates. Many teams at Sika have quickly realized the benefits of Acrobat Sign for its strong audit trails, which records information such as who signed a document, when, and from what IP address. Corporate teams also helped to spread the word when they realized the administrative and cost-saving benefits of Acrobat Sign.
Corporate IT at Sika wants to make Acrobat Sign available to every employee who works with documents, approvals and signatures. This team is also evaluating further the integrations of Acrobat Sign with additional solutions to support seamless and automated workflows that pull data into templates and send documents for signature to the right parties.
“There are many products on the market that digitize workflows and signatures for very specific purposes, but Adobe Acrobat Sign has the flexibility to integrate any workflow, any solution, and any use case,” says Ferrer. “Sika staff will be able to work more efficiently by taking advantage of the easy-to-use solution and full functionalities of Adobe Acrobat Sign.”