The procurement team at Manningham City Council in Melbourne is leading the local authority towards digital signatures with an implementation of the Secured Signing platform.

"We initially took on Secured Signing to reduce the time it took us to turnaround contracts and other procurement documents." said Tim Lawson, Manager Procurement and Contracts for Manningham City Council.

]"As we asked people in other work teams to sign their procurement documents online, it drove a conversation about how useful eSignatures are and how they can make every process simpler and quicker."

Continuing to work with paper contracts, conflict of interest declarations and evaluation reports was identified by Manningham City Council as a waste of effort and a barrier to being more agile and responsive. Even just the process of printing and collating the paper documents for significant tenders took many hours of work without even considering the time taken to move these through the building and remind people to sign and return them.

Signed paper documents needed to be manually scanned into the corporate records system. A process constrained to paper provided zero process visibility. It wasn't possible to see who had signed, who hadn't and where the bottleneck might be in a signature workflow that included multiple people.

Collating documents on screen, sending them for signing online, seeing documents returned within minutes rather than days and a simple dashboard providing complete visibility of process, has completely transformed the procurement process.

"It has become such an important part of the way we work now, we wouldn't know what to do without Secured Signing." observed Mr Lawson.

Other work teams across Council have since identified ways in which eSignatures could improves their process, reduce effort and save money. Requisitions for non-procurement payments like the return of bonds are now an online form that is approved with Secured Signing.

Councillor expense reimbursements are more timely as a result of not having to walk a paper forms through multiple signatories across the building. The automation capabilities of Secured signing were leveraged to have all staff sign to acknowledge a recently refreshed IT acceptable use policy with more than 700 individuals invited to sign with just a few clicks. Not that the procurement team are standing still. They are looking at other ways to use Secure Signing online forms.

"The journey at Manningham City Council reflects one of the core advantages of SaaS systems." observed Mike Eyal, Managing Director of Secured Signing. "Unlike traditional on premise systems where you made a large upfront investment and had to push to change behaviour to drive adoption, hosted systems can start with small successes and seamlessly add capacity to responsd to increased demand."