Complete transactions faster. Purchase and sell effectively.

Step 1: Identify Your Use Cases

Internal Research

First, identify individuals in departments or teams who will benefit from the change and increased efficiency (typically managers). Assure interviewees that may be resistant to change that there is nothing to fear from automation, and that their input is valued and will help the company by helping them to be even more successful at their jobs.

After you have determined the correct people to speak to, start your research. Try to avoid questions that elicit feelings or opinions. Here are some standard questions that could prove useful:

• What is our current document drafting process?
• What is our current document workflow and approval process, and the state of our lifecycle management?
• What does our current contract signing process look like? Do we use electronic signatures?
• What are the current challenges we are facing?
• What contracts or other documents are used most frequently? Is it possible to estimate how much time, on average, it takes to draft each without automation?
• What metrics are available?
• What are our software usage and data security policies?

Calculate Your Automation’s Return On Investment (ROI)

Investment = Time and Resources spent in the following areas:

• Document Assembly: Time spent defining the Conditions and logical dependencies that power automation. How many different logically dependent / conditioned content and alternative wording options will be automated within the document.
  

• Document Lifecycle Management: Time spent developing automated Workflows and defining the proper User permissions and User Groups.
  

• Environment: Time spent preparing the Workspace (i.e., Branding, Footers, Categories, Document Groupings, etc.)

• On-Premise (if applicable, i.e, not using a cloud based solution): Time spent installing the solution and preparing it for use (e.g., servers, integrations, etc.)

Frequently Automated Documents For Retail Businesses

Step 2: Choose the Right Solution

Important Features

Legito customers similarly placed in your industry have found that, in addition to Legito’s core features, the following features cater particularly well to Retail Businesses:

• Template Suits (Bundled Documents)
• Smart Import
• eSignature
• API integrations
• Analytics and Statistics
• External Sharing
• Workflows and Approvals
• Deadline Reminders

Useful Resources

Commonly used criteria

• End-users ease of use
  
• Scope of use-cases to be covered by software
  
• Fast software development with continual updates
  
• Product road map for the upcoming year
  
• Out-of-the-box integrations with other applications

Additional criteria will depend on the size of your business (Enterprise, Midsize, or Early Stage), and of course, company specific criteria will be determined based on your business’ unique use cases.

Step 3: Implementation

Once you have selected a tool, get to know it and have at least one person learn all the ins and outs. This person may become your first Power User.

Determine which would be more appropriate, an in-house or an outsourced implementation solution.

Have the individual most intimate with the workings of the new solution work with your Knowledge Experts and manage expectations of the solution’s capabilities (probably this initial Power User).

After you’re satisfied with the initial use case, build upon lessons learned, and select another. Don’t make a half-way effort, make sure you have perfected the automation use case. Then you can move with confidence to a new project with increased scope and complexity.

Timing – select an off-peak period in your business cycle to ensure a smooth roll-out and ensure the least disruption.

Outsourced Implementation

Step 4: Adoption

End-user On-Boarding

Communication! Ensure that your messaging manages End User expectations for the product’s capabilities and the benefits.

• Prepare training materials and use various media (documents, video, animation) to use for personal or online workshops.

• Leverage existing knowledge repositories to store helpful information. Easily accessible resources speed up the onboarding process for new hires.

• Set up training sessions headed up by your Power Users. It can be helpful to offer regular refresher courses long after implementation.

• Accessibility: Consider using your Legito Workspace Footer to link to resources, which may include an internal point of contact who can help end-users.

Feedback & Continuous Improvement

Curveballs – You may get lucky, but it’s highly unlikely that everything will go perfectly in the first instance. Usually there will be something that wasn’t anticipated. Some fringe case that wasn’t anticipated but actually may prove worth including. Be patient, listen to your team, and make the changes as you need.

Being 100% programming free, Legito makes it easy to adjust and update its automations. 

Measurements

Take the estimations determined from your original ROI calculations and compare inputs and results from your pre-automation state with metrics captured after the implementation of your chosen solution. Use this real data to calculate your real ROI and see how much you’ve saved through automation.

Legito’s Analytics features may be useful for additional quantitative measures to your assessment.

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