Boehringer Ingelheim uses DocuSign eSignature for agile contracting

Founded in 1885, Boehringer Ingelheim is one of the pharmaceutical industry’s top 20 companies. With nearly 50,000 employees in 180+ countries worldwide, Boehringer Ingelheim creates value through innovation daily within their three business areas—human pharmaceuticals, animal health and bio-pharmaceuticals.

Just as the pharmaceutical industry continues to evolve, so must Boehringer Ingelheim. In 2016, Boehringer Ingelheim’s corporate Legal & Compliance department wanted a more agile contracting process as signing agreements were commonly taking over two weeks to complete.

Furthermore, their paper-based contracting processes offered limited visibility or transparency. As a result, Boehringer Ingelheim collaborated with our Advisory Services team to start an electronic signature solution initiative that was compliant and auditable across the globe.

Boehringer Ingelheim relied on us to evolve the thinking around how the company prepared, signed, acted on and managed agreements globally. As a result, in 2017 a global initiative began. Within the first two months of the project’s start date, Boehringer Ingelheim was able to deploy DocuSign eSignature to groups in Brazil, Middle East, Turkey, and Africa (META), and the United States for NDAs, sourcing contracts, and Healthcare Provider agreements.

Partnership with DocuSign Customer Success Increases ROI

Our teams collaborated closely from the get-go to meet Boehringer Ingelheim’s aggressive timeline. Our Advisory Services team—including several dedicated Customer Success Architects (CSAs)—not only provided hands-on assistance with a Single-Sign On (SSO) implementation, but also shared best practices and industry expertise to accelerate their journey.

After a successful deployment, our team performed value assessments with each business group to quantify the return on investment. These early results gave Boehringer Ingelheim the evidence and confidence that DocuSign could be adopted by colleagues across the globe. Boehringer Ingelheim was able to observe a 6x increase in their return on their investment, 88% reduction of errors and decreased their document turnaround time of two weeks to three days.

Boehringer Ingelheim also minimized their environmental footprint by reducing paper and saw a huge uptick in mobile signing. Additionally, these early results were in line with helping Boehringer Ingelheim achieve its digital and “Be Green” initiatives.

Transformation at scale with DocuSign eSignature

After the success of the DocuSign eSignature first initiative, business owners at Boehringer Ingelheim encouraged the rapid deployment of DocuSign across the organization. A long-term, strategic approach was needed to manage and scale growth globally. With the help of their CSAs, Boehringer Ingelheim was able to establish a Center of Excellence (COE) that was responsible for sharing best practices, developing standard processes and procedures, scaling enablement and driving awareness of the digital solution globally. Within two years of deployment, Boehringer Ingelheim’s COE team has deployed DocuSign in over 80 countries, enabling over 5,500 employees with the knowledge and skills to use the digital solution efficiently and effectively.

Roadmap to the DocuSign Agreement Cloud

Boehringer Ingelheim will continue to leverage their partnership with our Customer Success team to build out a more robust DocuSign Agreement Cloud roadmap to harness other aspects of the platform’s capabilities. Although the pharmaceutical company has already integrated our eSignature solution with existing tools, including their Human Resources and Contract Management systems, they will continue to modernize their system of agreement by continuing to explore further integration opportunities.