Electronic Contract Routing Initiative

About the Program

Category: Information Technology (Best in Category)

Year: 2015

Orange County NC was presented with a challenge to move from an existing “print in triplicate and drive/mail/deliver" system for routing contracts. We leveraged a digital signature solution we had been using for accepting applications with our Parks and Recreation Department (DEAPR), and overlaid the technology with the existing routing structure. The result is a system that has delivered expedited turn-around time on executing contracts, and significant cost savings per contract. A 100 page contract, calculating for fuel, staff time, consumables, and postage, has a savings of around 45 dollars, offering a 40 to 50k savings based on a yearly average of 1000 contracts. We’ve also gone from a timeline of “weeks” for execution of a contract, to an internal record of 18 minutes end to end, and a rolling average of less than one hour. The accountability and integrity of the documents is harder to assign a number to, but is invaluable in completing this process under the guidelines of policy and the law. We no longer have to determine at who’s desk the contract has stalled as the signature solution offers step by step tracking. Finally, this has been one of our most well received projects on an inter-departmental scale in years. It is well received throughout our organization, is used in each and every department, and scored very highly when we surveyed the initial group of users. We delivered training to a core group, and have taken to “train the trainer” methodology to spread the concepts within individual departments. As needed, we offer 1:1 training to first time users. The result of doing it this way has been fantastic, and we’ve had only a handful of calls to IT since going live. http://youtu.be/Dc7evL2pDIM