How Maersk is driving value from electronic signatures and DocuSign Insight

At this year’s Momentum, we reviewed the innovation we’ve seen over the last year through customer interviews, demos, panels and breakout sessions. Here we delve into how Maersk, the world's largest integrated shipping company, is driving value from electronic signatures, AI and contract analytics. We also deep dive into our eSignature and Insight products—what they are and how they can be used. 

Read on to hear from Jacob Gorm-Larsen, Director of Digital Procurement at Maersk and author of “A Practical Guide to e-auctions”, as he speaks to Enterprise Account Executive at DocuSign, Faiz Alidina. You can also watch Momentum in-full, on-demand.

Could you start by telling us a little bit about Maersk as an organisation and what your role is within the company? 

Most people would probably know Maersk as being an ocean carrier for containers, but over the past 4/5 years, we've gone through a massive transformation as a company, from being a conglomerate that operated in a number of industries to now being a company focused within transportation and logistics. Today we are the global integrator of containers logistics. 

I am the head of Digital Procurement at the company, meaning that I am responsible for the digitisation of end-to-end processes within procurement. 

It's been a really big evolution for Maersk, and thinking about some of the business challenges that the organisation faces—what were the specific challenges that led you to DocuSign, and what specific DocuSign products are you using to help address those challenges?

We have been a DocuSign customer since 2017, when we introduced eSignature into our processes. The reason for introducing eSignature was really around usability; we wanted to make it easy for our colleagues to be compliant with the best practice processes that we've designed for contract signatures and DocuSign eSignature provided that usability. 

In 2018 we expanded the partnership and added DocuSign insight to the portfolio of products and solutions that we use.

You mentioned best practice there...when we’re talking about eSignature, in addition to the obvious advantages around ease of use and doing business, what does eSignature give Maersk as an organisation?

Using eSignature gives us better knowledge into who is signing our contracts—sometimes in the past, when the process was offline, it was harder to maintain that visibility. With eSignature we know exactly who is signing contracts, when, and where they have signed it. Speed is another very important element, the entire signing process has been sped up significantly with eSignature. 

The last 12 months have presented businesses with a lot of challenges in the way they work, when we think about your use of eSignature—how have you seen that accelerate?

As with everybody else, we've been hit by the pandemic over the last year. With everybody working from home signing contracts would have been literally impossible without eSignature. We've seen a huge uptake, not only within Procurement but across the business in adopting eSignature as a solution to keep the business running. 

Earlier you mentioned your use of DocuSign Insight—could you talk to us about how you've been using it?

DocuSign Insight gives us the ability to better understand our portfolio of contracts—I'm not talking about the individual contract itself but the portfolio of over 10,000 contracts. 

By being able to run analytics and gain deep insights across that portfolio, we can better understand it. What that gives us as a procurement function is agility. Now, when we have a business challenge we can run it through Insight and then find out what our contract says in relation to it. This could be regarding what our level of compliance is regarding a certain clause, payment terms, a sustainability clause etc.This enables us to quickly figure out what our contract language says about a certain thing.

In the past, the only report we could run were the ones that we had metadata on, and that sets a number of limitations.That's where agility kicks in. Today we are not limited by metadata on what report we can run because we can run reports on everything.

Take a few minutes to watch the full interview below or catch-up on Momentum in-full, on-demand.  

Product Spotlight - DocuSign Insight

What is DocuSign Insight? 

DocuSign Insight provides powerful AI analysis of agreements to help you uncover organisational risks, obligations and opportunities.

• Dramatically accelerate contract search and review
• Increase the accuracy and breadth of reviews
• Bring non-standard and rogue agreements back under control
• Reduce the risk of non-compliance and negative business outcomes
• Gain actionable insights to drive business value 

DocuSign Insight delivers a proven combination of AI technologies—natural language processing, machine learning, latent semantic indexing, OCR and rules-based logic—to help organisations manage and analyse their agreements. Learn more about DocuSign Insight by watching the short video below. 

You can also learn more about how contract contract analytics gives procurement actionable insights in our blog. d

Product Spotlight - DocuSign eSignature 

What is an electronic signature?

Electronic signatures are an increasingly popular way of quickly signing documents, such as contracts or receipts of delivery. They offer businesses an excellent option for securely gathering signatures and more advanced types of electronic signature technology can help to safeguard against fraud. But what you may not know are all of the other benefits of using electronic signatures and what best practice looks like.

Learn more about e-signatures in our blog: Almost everything you need to know about electronic signatures. 

Why do you need eSignature? 

1. eSignatures are safe, secure and confidential
2. Create a clear, digital audit trail
3. Electronic signatures improve time management
4. eSignatures make you easier to do business with
5. They easily integrate with existing systems
6. Electronic signatures are convenient and versatile 

Watch Momentum to see a demo of how eSignature can be used to process an auto-insurance claim. This demo highlights how to use templates, how SMS can be used for responsive signing, how users can get real-time notifications on agreements from directly within Microsoft Teams. Discover how the: 

• Claimant can easily file a claim 
• Insurance adjuster deems the claim a loss
• Insurance agent completes the full end-to-end process and finishes the claim