Case Study: Ashoka Lion

EchoSign Pushes Ashoka Lion to the Forefront of the “Green Management” Movement in Real Estate

Company Overview

Ashoka Lion is a full service property management firm that provides investor management as well association management services in the Houston and Dallas area. Ashoka Lion strives to be a premiere firm leading the charge towards ecologically conscious property management. In 2009 the company made a commitment to creating a paperless office environment to support its cost saving agenda and reduce its ecological impact. Striving to be a leader in providing cutting edge services to their clients, the company created an online portal for owners, tenants, vendors. In addition, the company has made a concerted effort to collect payments using electronic mechanisms.

Workflow Challenge

For Ashoka Lion, the shift to the paperless office created a tremendous improvement in the company's process, but the problem of getting contracts, estimates and other documents signed online remained. The property management industry is a paper driven industry involving approvals of many documents including estimates, leases, and management contracts. The time involved to sign a document, mail it, sign it, and scan it created significant, additional time for Ashoka Lion. Additionally, the company relied heavily on customer approvals through emails. However, this created an archive problem because there was not a central place where managers could find their approvals of documents. In addition, customers were returning signed contracts via fax, and often pages were missing or areas of the contract were inadvertently left blank, so employees from Ashoka Lion would spend time following up with these customers to get complete information.

EchoSign Solution

In January 2010, Jay Raman, Managing Director, Ashoka Lion, was researching how to further the company’s paperless office mission and decided to use EchoSign to get documents signed electronically. “Now, when an owner approves an estimate for a job to be done, EchoSign automatically sends them the signed copy for their records. When we invoice the client there is no confusion about the charges or work that has been performed,“ comments Jay.

Results

“EchoSign has automated the process and reduced the time spent storing, scanning, and archiving documents to mere minutes. In addition, our clients are impressed with our company's efforts to cut down on their paper usage,” says Jay. “Another benefit is that we can track the status of contracts, and see if our clients have received the document and actually reviewed them. EchoSign has improved our administrative and sales functions.”

We are so completely satisfied with how EchoSign is pushing our firm to the forefront of the ‘Green Management’ movement in real estate! — Jay Raman, Managing Director, Ashoka Lion