The Department of General Services announced on its blog Monday that the department has begun using e-signatures in a pilot.
"The e-signature saves days, if not weeks, for a vendor to complete and DGS to finalize a contract. We’re now saving time, eliminating paper, and making it easier for vendors to do business with DGS," the blog post reads.
The first contract was signed on Monday, in just over four hours, when DGS emailed a small business a contract for pamphlet publishing for the Office of State Publishing.
The department has been moving "towards it for about a year and a half," Andrew Sturmfels, deputy director of administration at DGS, said.
"This is the first fully executed e-sign contract DGS has done. We are using a statewide contract for the actual technology, that the Department of Technology put in place for statewide use," Sturmfels said. "The vendor we're using for the electronic capabilities is DocuSign."
The pilot focuses on "commodities and service contracts that are within our purchase delegation," Sturmfels said.
"Once we finish the pilot, basically the goal is for DGS to continue to grow in using electronic signatures. So that would extend out both to our procurement division for all the statewide contracts that they do and also we'll be creating a toolkit for other departments to use as other departments want to go electronic with their signatures for contracts. They can use the toolkit to guide that," Sturmfels said.
Those departments could use the CDT statewide contract.
"What DGS did about a year ago was, we issued a management memo that authorized the use of electronic signatures for contracts. Since that time, we've been working to update the state contracting manual and the state administrative manual to provide the necessary guidance and framework for departments if they want to adopt electronic signatures," Sturmfels said. "The final and probably biggest collaborative partnership that we put in place was with the State Controller's Office."
DGS faced a challenge in verifying signatures so the SCO could pay, even if a signature was no longer "wet."
"We worked with them to develop security protocols and audit protocols and traceability so that they could have confidence that the document sign process that we selected was something they could feel secure in making payments against," Sturmfels said.
California Department of Transportation (Caltrans) and departments using scanned signatures have been using electronic signatures, according to Sturmfels. Others have waited since the memo "for us to tell them how."
DGS handles around 5,000 contracts per year for DGS needs.
Sturmfels said the department had to work with multiple partners to create the pilot. DGS' Office of Business and Acquisition Services, Enterprise Technology Solutions, Procurement Division and Office of Legal Services were internal partners while the State Controller’s Office and CDT were also involved.
