Case Study: Upstate Cerebral Palsy
“EchoSign has changed the way we do business”
Company Overview
Established in 1950, and today with over 70 locations in upstate New York, Upstate Cerebral Palsy offers a full range of direct-care programs and life enriching services for individuals with special needs (i.e. physically challenged, developmentally disabled or mentally handicapped) and their families. The age of program participants ranges from birth (i.e. early intervention) through adulthood (i.e. residences, day habilitation, medical clinics). Upstate Cerebral Palsy is the largest non-profit agency in the Mohawk Valley region of New York State.
Workflow Challenge
Bruce Brodsky, Director of Special Projects, Upstate Cerebral Palsy, had two problems. His internal processes for handling documents such as requisitions, employee status changes, job descriptions, and spend approvals was neither efficient or timely. These documents were frequenty physically couriered between 70 locations on a volunteer basis. “Mail could literally take days to get to one place”, says Bruce. “Each month we had 3-400 documents that needed internal signatures, and the manual process to collect signatures was not working.” Bruce implemented an online system using forms created by Acrobat and stored centrally online. However, users had to open a form, complete it offline, re-attach, and email it off for one or more signatures that repeated the process. “This was better than our volunteer courier system, but not by much because many of our users had old versions of Acrobat and not everyone in the organization had email.”
EchoSign Solution
In late 2008 Bruce was searching online for a better solution and found EchoSign. From an IT perspective, Upstate Cerebral Palsy has been moving towards the software as a services (SaaS) model for many of their mission critical applications so EchoSign fit with this strategy. “Our resources are thin and we can’t take on more application maintenance. SaaS represents the future so we are always looking for creative and innovative applications to work with”, says Bruce. “We now send out nearly 250 documents for approval each month with EchoSign. Soon our human resources and program leadership departments will begin to use the service, and our purchasing group is exploring the use of EchoSign with contracts with external vendors.” Training users has been done through a recorded video session that employees can view at any time and webcasts. “EchoSign is so easy to use that we have done very few 1-on-1 training sessions.”
Results
“EchoSign has changed our whole process of communication, and changed the way we do business.” Upstate Cerebral Palsy has seen tremendous efficiency gains – documents that used to take days or literally weeks to sign, are now signed in minutes. Recently, Bruce sent out a satisfaction survey on EchoSign with the following results:
- 57% were very satisfied
- 32% were satisfied
- 30% have used EchoSign 6 or more times
- 80% had signed at least 2-3 documents with EchoSign
- 46% had learned EchoSign on their own
- 7% have signed their approvals on their home computers or with handheld devices
“For us these are very impressive statistics. We couldn’t be happier with EchoSign.”
EchoSign has changed the way we do business!
— Bruce Brodsky, Director of Special Projects, IT, Upstate Cerebral Palsy