Duke-NUS Medical School
WorkflowGen/DocuSign Integration Case Study
Overview
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Duke-NUS Medical School (Duke-NUS) has been using Advantys’ WorkflowGen solution to manage its workflow applications since 2018. However, this usage has largely been restricted to handling workflow routing and approval, without any digital signatures involved. There is now a new demand and requirement for the solution to be able to integrate with digital signing solutions (such as DocuSign) to achieve better process integration and automation. One such use case is the “Research Contract Approval” workflow for their Office of Innovation & Entrepreneurship (OIE).
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With the above requirement, Duke-NUS started to explore if WorkflowGen (or another product on the market) could support such a feature. As the sole distributor of Advantys’ WorkflowGen in the APAC region, Office Information Australia organised Duke-NUS and Advantys to collaborate and create a proof of concept (POC) that would fulfill Duke-NUS’ needs. By building customised components within WorkflowGen, Advantys was able to allow WorkflowGen to trigger a DocuSign sub-flow (via APIs) to send the uploaded research contract document (via DocuSign envelope) to designated internal approvers and external collaborators for signing. With an estimated 75 users processing 20 requests per month using the “Research Control Approval” workflow, the integration has decreased turnaround time by up to 50% since implementation.
Outcome
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Duke-NUS required a digital signing solution to be integrated with WorkflowGen to deliver “Research Contract Approval” workflow as a POC. The project had a tight timeframe, needing to be completed within two months of the initial scoping sessions. Meeting the intended objectives, Duke-NUS’ workflow has become more streamlined and facilitates better monitoring and tracking on the contract approval and digital signing processes with internal and external users – an end-to-end automated workflow solution.
Based on this experience of integrating DocuSign in version 7 of WorkflowGen, Advantys has announced that a native integration will be introduced in version 8. Interactions will be facilitated through the new agent action principle, eliminating the need for additional Windows services, and thus providing an intuitive and efficient WorkflowGen experience.
2020 was a very challenging year forcing businesses to take procedures to allow staff to work from home, this collaboration thus came at a perfect time to help automate and streamline business processes.
“With the onset of Covid-19 in Singapore, and all staff being home-based for an extended period of time, combined with the dramatic increase in our research contracts volume, we needed a solution to handle e-approvals and e-signatures within one platform. Advantys and OIA were instrumental in helping us to develop the integrated end-to-end solution and the new WorkflowGen with DocuSign system has now revolutionised our turnaround times with an almost 50% decrease in time taken for having contracts approved and signed. The feedback and user acceptability was so positive that we are now looking to implement this process integration across other functions in the schools as well.”
– Natasha Raina, Deputy Director, Contracts & Industry Engagement, Duke-NUS
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“The success of this POC collaboration has opened up new opportunities for the School to automate other workflows and processes which will benefit from such an integration. The project would not have completed so smoothly without the strong project and technical support from both Advantys and OIA.”
- Loh Swee Nam, Associate Director, Information Technology, Duke-NUS