MacKellar Group breaks new ground with e-signature efficiencies using Adobe Acrobat Sign

Operating and maintaining a fleet of 450 heavy-duty trucks and machines used for earthmoving, mining, road construction, and other major infrastructure projects isn’t easy. Australia’s MacKellar Group, a leading equipment hire, services, and solutions firm, relies on its 375 skilled maintenance personnel along with hundreds of expert operators and drivers to keep projects on track.

According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, Australia saw a 5.6 percent increase in mining investment in 2023, fuelled by iron-ore projects and mineral developments for resources used in electric car batteries. In the past three years, MacKellar Group’s headcount increased from 200 to 1,000 to support this growth. With Australia’s unemployment rate recently hitting a 50-year low, recruiting and retaining skilled talent is more important and challenging than ever.

Robust solutions for a growing company

Leighton Taylor joined MacKellar Group as ICT Manager when the company brought its IT management in house. Over the past few years, he’s focused on scaling the IT infrastructure, including consolidating vendors and streamlining workflows. The opportunity for more technology-driven efficiency in the HR department led Taylor and his team to standardise on Adobe Document Cloud and Adobe Acrobat Sign.

“We needed a consistent approach to HR documentation, from signing employment agreements to forms for onboarding, offboarding, leaves, and payroll,” says Taylor. “We already used Adobe Acrobat across the organisation, so adding Acrobat Sign was the next logical step.”

MacKellar engaged DynAPPix, an IT and business process automation consultancy and Adobe partner, to migrate key document templates from a legacy tool into Acrobat Sign within 10 working days. The team of consultants consolidated more than 100 template variations prior to activating the new and improved templates and workflows, right on schedule.

“We have the know-how and tools to make the rollover easy, which relieves a lot of concerns from companies like MacKellar Group when they’re dealing with critical business documents,” says Michael Chesswas, CEO at DynAPPix.

Accelerating HR and payroll signoffs

Josh Hamilton, ICT App Developer at MacKellar Group, helped the HR team set up employment contract templates and workflows that automatically route documents in the right order to stakeholders for approvals. Since the terms and conditions for an apprentice engineer in Western Australia can be different than those for a tyre fitter in Central Queensland, HR managers can customise contracts in Microsoft Word to suit various roles as well as varied worksite requirements.

“Our HR team can easily drag and drop what they need into the Acrobat Sign workflow,” says Hamilton “They don’t need to spend time on formatting, so they can send contracts faster and are confident that everything goes smoothly.”

MacKellar’s IT team values the single sign-on integration with Microsoft Entra ID for seamless user identity and access management using federated identities. For new hires, IT staff easily assign a security group for the required permissions. Within 30 minutes, employees can start using Acrobat Standard or Acrobat Pro, along with Acrobat Sign.

“The integration results in a big-time savings for provisioning software and is important for efficient offboarding,” says Hamilton. “Our employees like the simplicity of logging in just once to access everything they need, including the e-signature platform. At the same time, we get the security of multifactor authentication.”

With MacKellar’s prior e-signature tool, teams might encounter issues if someone who sent an agreement for signature went on leave. “No one else could access the agreement and the e-signature process would stall. With integration in the Adobe platform, someone else can pick up where a colleague left off,” says Hamilton.

Engineering efficient growth with automation

The IT team trained employees on the new e-signature platform, including how they can build their own workflows to take advantage of automations. “Our company is growing so rapidly that the faster our HR and payroll teams can onboard new talent and take care of the important requests that keep employees happy, the better,” Taylor says.

Taylor notes multiplying benefits as MacKellar streamlines additional workflows. “With less human intervention required, we speed up e-signature processes and get more consistent results. The savings in time, costs, and resources benefit the business as we grow,” Taylor says. “Compared to our legacy tool, we spend half as much and get a lot more in return.”

Taylor looks forward to integrating Acrobat Sign with other systems to further streamline business processes. Recently MacKellar was acquired by Canada’s North American Construction Group, which uses Oracle JD Edwards EnterpriseOne ERP software. With MacKellar planning to migrate to the same ERP, Taylor is glad that the Adobe environment will integrate easily for expanded use across operational teams.

“We’re looking at significant growth over the next few years so we need to be smart with our resources. Adobe helps us do that,” Taylor says.