Atlas Professionals revolutionize contract signatures with Adobe Sign

Image source: Adobe Stock / Federico Rostagno.

Founded in 1982, Atlas Professionals is committed to providing highly qualified and competent professionals to industry-leading companies within the marine, energy and renewables industries. Unlike other companies that focus their operations within their home country, Atlas Professionals recruits and deploys personnel worldwide. With offices in 18 countries, Atlas Professionals is truly a global company, giving them the opportunity to search far and wide for the most talented professionals to meet the needs of their many international clients. But it’s not without its challenges, such as the cross-border elements that present additional burdens in administration, taxation and legal regulations.

Moving a professional from one country to work in another requires a lot of paperwork, especially in the age of COVID-19. Additionally, compliance is essential. “We are a very regulated industry as you would expect, so compliance is at the heart of everything we do,” explains Neil Lawler, head of product and innovation at Atlas Professionals. On any given day, Atlas Professionals has around 3,000 people working on-and-offshore within the marine, energy and renewables industries worldwide, on both short and long-term assignments, making efficient document processing a critical business need.

A digital transformation starts with employment contracts

With Adobe Sign, Atlas has made the signing of electronic documents accessible, fast and compliant for the professionals in the field. Features such as the Audit Trail have also provided greater oversight to all parties with regards to document status, progress and completion — an area of particular importance when working with employment contracts.

In early 2019, Atlas Professionals kicked off their first automation project with Adobe Sign and Salesforce, with the goal to seamlessly embed the digital send-and-sign experience within their contracts process. The principal use case was simple. Once the contract was approved internally, Adobe Sign handled the hard work with automatic sending, meaning internal users saved precious time from emailing, storing, chasing, and filing documents manually.

The new Adobe Sign process revolutionized contract signatures overnight. Contracts that took weeks or months to sign because of the manual and paper-driven process were reduced to a 60-minute median sign time. In addition, internal users won back considerable time by not manually monitoring and chasing unsigned contracts each day.

“We created workflows that created an Adobe Sign agreement and sent it to the professional automatically. Not only did we benefit from the digital signature and audit trail, but we also removed the manual act of sending and filing emails. For our users, it was like magic when the process kicked in, with the contract being sent, signed and returned to Salesforce without any manual intervention,” explained Lawler.

Within a short space of time, Atlas’ professionals in the field were realizing the Adobe Sign benefits with faster job confirmations and employment contract signatures — which in turn triggered the next phase of the project for Atlas.

Adobe Agreement Templates

From here, Atlas Professionals reviewed all their paper documents, forms and templates that needed a signature and migrated these forms to Adobe Sign and Salesforce. Using merge fields within the templates, Atlas benefitted from automating tedious, repetitive work by adding personnel and operational information directly into a document before sending. Their professionals working worldwide — many offshore or in remote locations without access to printers — welcomed the change. Now they could use their smartphone or tablet to complete and sign documents, no matter their location.

“It’s very intuitive signing on a phone or a tablet, which gave us an advantage when COVID hit,” said Lawler. “Suddenly our professionals needed to fill out even more documents to be able to travel and work, meaning our Adobe Sign usage exploded overnight. We were thankful to be ahead of the digital curve when work from home began, as our administrative processes were able to continue unaffected.”

For Atlas, the seamless integration of Adobe Sign within Salesforce meant the removal of paper documents from their workflows and use of the combined features from both products. Reports and dashboards made it easy and transparent to track documents out for signature, waiting for a countersignature or completed with signatures. Data on response times or the number of days documents remain unsigned was readily available, and teams could act on the insights.

Adobe Sign for Microsoft Office 365

Recently Atlas Professionals completed a move to Microsoft Office 365 to use Adobe Sign’s integration with Microsoft’s full suite of products. “In the last six months we’ve migrated to Office 365 across the group, so now we have the Adobe Sign panel available within Outlook, Teams, Word and Powerpoint,” said Lawler. “We’re now using Adobe Sign more heavily internally to send documents to our colleagues for HR, legal, insurance and commercial reasons.”

In Atlas’ DNA

The Salesforce and Microsoft Adobe Sign integrations ensure that Atlas Professionals can efficiently connect with internal colleagues and customers and professionals across the world. Digital document signing, and the benefit it brings, is now embedded in the DNA of Atlas.

“These days if somebody receives an email with a piece of paper asking them to sign, they immediately reply saying ‘can you send it by Adobe Sign?’,” confirmed Lawler.