Digital Signature Legitimacy for Higher Education in United States - Empower Your School with Secure eSigning Solutions

How to eSign a document: digital signature legitimacy for Higher Education in United States

[Music] thank you for being on today's webinar we are walking through how to reduce the cost of using an e-sign platform for your institution it's one challenge i can tell you we've heard from quite a few of our customers especially after covent so that's why we decided it'd be helpful to do a short presentation on it to see if we can help you out a little now a little bit before we jump in first of all my name is katie i am let me go to my next slide really quick i am a product marketing manager here at kowali but my true passion in life is to automate everything in fact if you are one of my friends and you say i've got this problem that i can't figure out the first thing i do is go to solutioning and figure out how i can help you do it more efficiently um so i'm a lean six sigma greenbelt certified uh individual and i have been trained in project management as well and in my day job i like to market the product because it helps me make sure i can help other people in the process let's take a trip down memory lane so let's go back to 2019 if you can remember that far back after last year back when we could actually hug each other oh the days and back when on college campuses you could actually be in person without wearing a mask and you could see a presentation and the instructor teaching in person and back in the days when your colleagues would bring delicious donuts to the office oh i don't know if we all forget or i'm sure we don't forget them i don't know if we regret not having those over the last year but they were still quite wonderful and back in the day when signing something in person was actually a thing over the last year we've obviously seen that transition quite a bit and when 2020 imploded the world which i don't have to tell you what this graphic is you probably already know uh yes covid came and our worlds changed probably forever at some level or a capacity at least for the foreseeable future sports stadiums looked similar to this we enjoyed uh hilarious zoom meeting issues i would say through youtube videos and maybe too many zoom meetings i would say over the last year or so um social distancing became a word in normal language and you got used to probably electronically signing documents electronic signatures is by no means anything new but the amount of growth that we've seen on esign platforms is pretty remarkable in the last year so some of you may use some of these platforms on your campus um these are ones that uh timbalani the analyst room had recommended as common ones that higher education institutions use uh also focus mainly on and adobe sign because those are two of the most common platforms but if you're interested and you do have access to tambellini they put together a really helpful electronic signature tool comparison back in 2020 highly would recommend checking it out if you're interested in learning a little bit more about other tool sets some institutions may use so like i said today we're going to focus mainly on and adobe sign and some other functionality in those platforms but on a high level this is a graph that shows the actual market growth of the electronic signature market digital signature market from 2016 product projected to 2027 and you can see as of 2020 while we haven't seen remarkable growth you're seeing a really big increase in curve over the next five to six years because what we saw this last year i would say is not going to slow down this chart shows the growth of 's price in terms of the s p 500 and how much it's grown you can see in 2020 that immense curve that happened from that time period onward so electronic signatures is something that like i said has been here for quite some time but i feel like with the press pistol code increased dramatically and from what we heard from college partners all over the states and in canada the use of adobe sign and or type tools increased dramatically from a request standpoint on their campus so let's walk through a little bit of what makes up the cost of electronic signatures for an institution so then we can talk about how do you shape off some of those cost elements this is an interesting graph that uh the open view um analyst firm prepared in 2021 that talks about the difference in the trends of pricing that we're seeing in software as a service historically software had been pre-as a seat or a user-based license and typically i would say that was probably a legacy of on-premises software in which case pricing in a unique or different way wasn't really a possibility because technically speaking there were limitations to doing so now we've seen a dramatic shift from probably 2016 and onward where i think i saw a survey oh here's it says it 2014 survey said that 23 of sas companies had considered or implemented a pricing base a usage-based pricing model now that is almost at the same level of seats or users so this trend of usage-based pricing that we're seeing in electronic signature type tools is here to stay which means thinking about how to adapt to it and work within the constraints of it is really important as you look at planning for future cost implications for your institution one of the things i personally like about usage based value pricing is that it is usage-based pricing is that what sas companies are attempting to do is say how does someone actually derive value from our product so traditionally with on-premises software uh seat based licensing models didn't allow the flexibility to really connect value of how many people have access to the system that might not be what the value someone actually gets from that system is now there could be a correlation but it might not be the primary value driver so in usage based pricing one of the nice things is it actually lets an institution start at a lower price and ultimately connect you would hope the value of processing documents and getting approvals electronically in the product now the other side of that though is let's look at a different industry example to see how this can apply separately um i've been not really fascinated but i've gone to the gym for a long time and i think the subscription model we see in gyms is one of the earliest subscription models you pay a monthly fee and that's kind of how the model for fitness memberships have typically worked you pay a monthly fee whether you show up or whether you don't show up that's not necessarily driven with the value of a gym the value of a gym would be you could argue if you're getting fit if you're getting healthier if you're building relationships but by showing up you have to do those things that's the value i derive from a gym so a few years ago um this is orange theory fitness and if you don't know about them a lot of my girlfriends started going to orange three fitness what i found is really interesting is that they're taking a value-based approach to to a certain extent their classes um they actually charge you if you don't go which is always the first time i've ever heard of a gym charging if you don't go to a class the idea being it incentivizes you to go and by going you're deriving the value of hopefully moving towards your goal of either developing relationships or getting more fit so again different industry but the concept of value-based pricing is there the problem with value-based pricing which we're starting to see in various industries is that it can be quite complex it can be either complex to build from a vendor perspective and it can be really complex to predict and understand from an institution perspective um the best model that i can think of to illustrate this if you have ever been in technology planning and or if you've ever purchased cloud-based servers they have full companies dedicated to helping you figure out how aws and or azure pricing is developed this is a spreadsheet that walks through if you buy this type of server and if you pre-purchase it and i've done this type of thing for another role in the past it's really complicated so on a plus side you only use what you need to on the bad side if you don't plan and dedicate a significant amount of time to thinking about it you can get yourself in a little bit of a mess by not adapting to the usage-based pricing model so this is something that i found online it's an roa roi calculator for it's actually a really interesting one i thought it was impressive from forrester but one of the things that i thought was interesting in this is i'm only showing the top part of it but there's about 15 to 20 questions that they ask you throughout this calculator and it's all about how many things are you going through per month how many people are involved is their amount of time how many steps in the agreement process happen because in order to really calculate their price that they would charge you there's a lot of elements to consider um so thinking about that well if you have already purchased obviously an e-sign tool being aware of what those elements are and predicting them is really important if you're on the lookout for a tool be aware of the fact that you really need to think critically about the different elements that are involved and how you can control for those factors i'm personally a fan of dilbert uh comics i haven't seen him in a few years but this one i found quite humorous where it it's making fun of the fact that prices are intentionally confusing because if we can't actually figure out the prices then it's a level playing field across all of the competitors and to a certain extent in certain industries i feel like that's what we're seeing e-sign pricing i think you can start to argue is going in that direction there's two access points that you typically see with an e-sign model one access point on a pricing curve so if you look at the far left hand side of the graph you're going to see users generally speaking the amount of people who have access to the platform is one pricing element the number of transactions is the other pricing element and as you increase either users typically depending on the model there's a level of transactions that are either included in the users or can be purchased separately from them different vendors do this differently so for example adobe sign you can purchase um either on an enterprise plan either by transaction or users so you have slightly more flexibility and generally speaking on each plan there's a level of feature limitations that come with each plan of api call limitations and or perhaps a separate plan for apis as well as potentially limitations or additional cost for integrations you're going to build into the system and so again not this most simple plan definitely a little bit of complexity going on this is an example of 's pricing model if you're not aware um their enterprise plan which mostly if you were looking at implementing it across an institution is where you'd be looking and that one has typically the ability to commit to different transaction levels and then adobe signs plan again like i mentioned is either on a user basis or on a transaction basis depending on the level that you're committing to so as part of this i think it's important to know what those things mean for each of the systems um so transactions for my usage-based model are defined differently depending on the vendor you're working with a transaction is typically defined for as an envelope so if you think that i have an envelope and i've got multiple papers in it and i hand that to someone to look at signing that is how works so in a way that's beneficial because you can get multiple signatures or depending on how you configure the system you could perhaps save cost on thinking about your implementation approach on adobe sign i believe their model is transaction based per signature but again looking and really understanding does that mean every signature and a process or does that mean only the final step in the process is really important as you start to figure out how to control costs the same thing with the user models and being really aware of different user licensing models and who has to pay to have access is really important typically speaking what i've seen is whoever is actually initiating the process or sending a document out for signature needs a license whereas if they're sending it to an external party um or someone that isn't actually in the initiation stage they may not need a license or and or may not need a paid license i would say in which case when you're thinking again implementation strategy planning out actually who needs to initiate a signature versus just participating in the process is a really easy way to start figuring out how you can reduce control costs across the entire implementation so there's four key ways that i would recommend looking at managing spend for something like an esign tool the first is looking at the policies on your institution and we'll walk through each of these individually but in a high level a lot of things don't actually need a signature and because we've now moved from this mentality 2019 where everything had to be wet signatures to now transitioning using digital transformation to a new model pushing back and evaluating that is important and training your users correctly based upon the elements of the pricing model is another way where you can begin to evaluate cost the third would be monitoring usage and the fourth which we'll dive into a little bit more in depth is actually looking at different tools on campus and seeing how you can offload some of the usage so let's talk about changing the policy um i have had active conversations with cio of the university of hawaii systems with individuals who oversee engineering departments and the consistent piece of feedback that i have heard is that there's a perception on campuses that everything has to be signed or that it's really hard to change that perception around does this actually need a signature or does it just need an approval um in some form or fashion there's still a lot of pdfs that exist on campus so that is one benefit of using a tool like adobe site or is i can scan a pdf into a system and have it actually sent through printing without using a tool like this an aim survey back in i want to say 2014 reported that by even using a pdf even where you could probably do something on your computer with it 65 of pdfs are still printed and signed so using pdfs even though it's digital is not the solution eSignature is an improvement but there's still a lot more you can do and even if you're thinking of e-signing something or electronically signing something um challenge or think about does this process actually legally need a verifiable signature or does it simply need an approval and we'll talk about that when we talk about different tool sets there's other tools that still allow you to approve something without actually drawing a signature and legally they're still verifiable and as long as the tool has audit history you can still see who did it when they did it etc so one of the things that we'll i'll talk to you a little bit about though is the difference between a digital signature and an electronic signature digital signatures are like electronic fingerprints so in the form of a coded message the digital signature securely associates a signer with an actual document in a recorded transaction so that means digital signatures are typically a higher level they're encrypted and they're sent um to make sure that through encrypting that that is a very unique signature the electronic signature on the other hand refers to a a date it refers to data in electronic form which is logically associated with data in the other form so essentially an electronic signature means that i am as simple as the term is electronically signing something um and having it time stamped on a particular document now one thing that's important to note is that in 2000 and 2000 the us government passed the e-sign act to ease the adoption of electronic signatures and so what that means is that the electronic signature is defined again like i said before as an electronic symbol or process attached to or logically associated with a contract or record that was executed and adopted by a person with the intent to sign that record that act in 2000 verifies that electronic signatures can be used in the court of law as evidence that they're legally viable as an option and that they're actually enforceable now there's a few things to note when you're looking at electronic signatures versus digital signatures first of all electronic signatures are legally verifiable in canada and the united states and some states have slightly different rules so just note that as you're thinking through this process but ultimately there's five elements this act says that electronic signatures need to be accepted the intent to sign and opt out the consent to do business electronically clear signature attribution the association of a signature with the record and an ability to retain that record of the signature for a period of time following the actual signature why that's important to know and why that's important to think about is that certain tools do those things better than others so just as you're thinking through electronic signatures make sure that you check those boxes to think about is this legally verifiable in the scenario my document needs a legally verifiable signature this is just an example of a policy from an institution but the cio's office and or you can have influence obviously in different offices to show and create a process by which only certain things need electronic signatures if your institute doesn't have institution doesn't have something like this i would recommend that as an initial step and then i would also recommend to look at different processes and figure out what we actually need to signature on versus what we don't and that can easily begin to save some of the cost of using a system like for adobe sign the next thing that we'll talk a little bit about is training users so obviously when you're rolling out a new implementation this would be part of the process but i'm specifically talking about making sure the users who are paid users in the system understand how to use it in a way that helps you control cost and users again this is the pricing model typically transactions and or user access or the three the two different elements of that model as well as things like api calls and integrations generally speaking i think the most opportunity for training you have is on signatures because different like i said different systems define things differently so in the system is defined as an envelope so if you're only sending one signature in the envelope when you could put 10 or 12 then you're clearly skyrocketing your costs unnecessarily making sure that the people who have control around those cost elements like the person who's initiating a signature understands how the model works i think will help enable them to make sure that they're using it in a way that's beneficial for the campus same thing with adobe sign in which users you have a maximum amount of users and there's different permission sets for those typically i believe with adobe sign there's a level of transaction associated with each user account making sure that they understand how many transactions they have how do they find how many transactions they've used is a way to just empower them to be conscious users when they're using a usage-based system the third element and this is probably hopefully fairly obvious would be actually monitoring the usage of the tool now this is one of my favorite graphics that i've used in presentations before um when i was being trained as a project manager under pmp training um one of the things that i think we can perceive incorrectly is the concept of risk so typically i think of risk is bad risk equals bad but that's not necessarily the case risk just means that in the event an uncertain condition could or could not occur it may have a positive or a negative effect for the mouse he could get the cheese and have a really good effect he could also have a very unfortunate and life-ending day if he did not get the cheese but either way you just don't know what's going to happen so i say that in the context of usage-based pricing because risk simply means not knowing and to mitigate that risk you have to create a strategy in advance to make sure you know what's happening the other element that i'll say is part of this is that i don't think vendors who are moving to usage based models do this as well as they could have and so for example with has a area where you can view how much has been used over a period of time um how many is sent how many is completed from what i could find and i granted don't know the system as innately well as some other systems but from what i could find there was not a way to easily schedule a report or set notifications to prevent over usage now that means that in the absence of that product feature you as the administrator or the executor over the system need to create processes in lieu of the vendor providing those for you the reasonable use policy essentially says that in the scenario that you exceed the amount of usage available of your plan and it appears to be abusive or burdensome they can shut you down and that would obviously be really terrible for an institution and so monitoring it will help prevent that i think in their policy isn't really explicit about what reasonable use means so having a conversation with them in advance and getting that as clear as possible would be something i'd strongly recommend and building in stopgap procedures to prevent again the uncertainty of risk is important now adobe sign on this case has reporting built in where you can actually do quite a bit more from what i could find a robust reporting in terms of signatures that are being processed you can also see who sent them so if you're a central it office and you want to monitor which departments are using the product more let's say for back billing i believe has the ability to do more complex reporting as well as you can see right there scheduling a report in advance so the benefit of doing that would be as long as you build your reports and can schedule them out you can help prevent overuse based upon the transaction limits of the system um and then finally knowing the transaction limits are also really important and so you can see generally speaking they have transaction limits on a user per user basis as well as certain things like how many pages can be in a transaction um knowing those and training your administrator of users and just general users on them can help create a model where you don't have cost overrun um another recommendation that i have heard and would would suggest would be set up a meeting maybe it's quarterly where you and other system administrators come together and just review usage at the very least typically if there's a meeting on my calendar i know i have to prepare for it so at the very least it's a stock up measure that forces you to think about it and forces you to pull reports and monitor and make sure you don't have any concerns the other benefit of that is if you're starting to see usage increase you can proactively look at budget requests because i know budget cycles can be more challenging for institutions so thinking in advance of that i think would be a recommended approach um finally i said this at the start but the systems the electronic signature systems i would say well usage-based billing can be beneficial because you grow as the system grows i think that these vendors particularly quite a few vendors around usage based have room to grow to provide you as a client the tools to monitor usage effectively and so with that in mind what i would encourage you to do is talk to your vendors suggest what are the things you need to help make sure that you're making the most of this value-based plan because vendors will listen and you have the power to influence final thing i'll talk to you about a little bit today is looking at other tools so electronic signature tools is one of a gamut of tools in the no code i would say application development well no code space um the no code space if you're not familiar it simply means that i have a visual representation of doing something that otherwise would only generally be able to be done on a technical backend so in this case i want to walk through some of those other tool sets so you get a sense of what are some of the things that you could explore using for your compass and maybe esign fits one gap but there's an opportunity to look at offloading some of the things you're currently using eSignatures for and moving them into other tool sets this graph shows some of the different capabilities that you're going to find on tools on campus today that are in the no code space as you move from the left side of the graph to the right side of the graph these tools increase in complexity so i put in this case e sign on the far left hand side because i actually think overall when you look at the functionality of tool sets that you could find on campus that help specialize in no code esign is actually one of the least complicated types not necessarily just complicated but also less in functionality as well i think esign tools are really good for things like contracts or things where you have a very explicit form that you can't change or you can't really modify the process on or a very simple process where you have an approval from one person to another um i think when you start looking at complexity of processes which we find a lot on campuses like well generally i'm sure if you've explained a process to someone typically this happens but unless this person answers it this way and then this happens and then oh yeah and then there's some those some of those circumstances where if this box is checked then it actually goes to a totally different department um e-sign tools don't handle that level of complexity typically very well because they don't have really advanced routing and automation built in so i i have seen campuses i believe in the last year use the tools at their disposal to react to the challenges of coven e-sign tools have been on campuses even generally speaking before 2020 um and campuses have said well let's move all of our approvals through those and i think there's a limitation that i would recommend institutions recognize when you say okay not everything should actually go through an e-sign tool um because there are a significant number of processes that are too complicated to do well in an e-sign tool so with that in mind i'll talk about the different tools i would recommend looking at for those types of processes um adobe sign it i'm just gonna walk through a vendor example of each of these uh the functionality and complexity of adobe sign is is quite low it's easy to use generally a user without a lot of experience can sign on and use it with no concerns um but the price uh it can be high because it's variable and it's unpredictable so that's why i listed that a little higher a digital forms tool is uh kind of the next version up and that allows you to create custom fields and add them into a graphical interface and allow the accepting of information now when i refer to a digital forms tool here i'm not referring to a set of approval workflow on the back end so it's more just the ingestion of information versus the processing of information on the back end the good thing is that it's pretty simple to use generally speaking we'll see digital forms tools pop up as shadow systems on campus and because they're so easy to use and typically they're quite low cost so people will use them as alternatives to having a lack of accessible tools the problem with that then is that generally it doesn't sign off on them so you have a lack of integrations and security and scalability with these tools the functionality and complexity of digital forms uh are again quite uh easy to use functionality is not that complex so it's not that capable and the price generally is either free and or included with another system google forms in this case would be either free for an individual user or included with the business google business suite which would be priced on a per user basis app creation is the next step up so that would be actually a tool that'll enable someone to create a full mobile app and use it on a cell phone um that's really easy well the pro is that it's easy to create mobile native apps that could be installed i think the challenge that i would say is that it can actually be somewhat challenging for non-technical users to pick up a system than the ones that i have seen at least and there may be a limited desktop application of those mobile apps as well so while the functionality is obviously significantly more than digital forms and esign the complexity also increases with some of that functionality and the price in this case i'm showing powerapps as the example would be included with microsoft suite so if you already have microsoft rolled out you have the ability to use something like this on your campus but there's a level of hesitation i would suggest just in how complex using a tool like that could potentially be um now the other thing that you'll note here is that i've actually unhidden i've created some color around e-sign and digital forms because app creation platforms like powerapps will actually have the ability to have esign functionality and e-sign module in their form so this is where you start to see okay is there a scenario where i need someone to fill out something on a mobile app where rather than having them do that through on a pre-existing pdf it would make a lot more sense to rebuild and improve that process and make it a mobile-friendly experience and then integrate a signature onto it and so start to think about that as we go through some of these other other tool sets document management is the next one a document management system would be something a little bit simpler would be box something more complex would be something like onbase which we'll talk about but ultimately uh document management systems are really good for complex or document centric processes the automation the good thing about this is that the automation generally centers around having a document hub but the challenge is typically an ecm system would be it owned and managed so there's a lack of accessibility for enabling other users to use a system like this i'm going to use onbase as an example because it's fairly prevalent on institutions nowadays and while the functionality is quite good and the complexity matches that in terms of how challenging i'd say a non-it user to jump in and use it without breaking something would be it can be quite costly uh on base and or most ecm systems that i've seen are priced on a per seat basis so when you start looking at well could i use onbase as a replacement for digital signatures um you then start to have to weigh the benefits of how many people do you need do i need to have access to something to sign a document and generally speaking a system like onbaseball may have um different permission sets that are priced differently per user but um it may or may not be more cost beneficial to do something like an eSignature through uh an ecm versus using adobe sign because the the cost models are just different and then finally what we'll talk through is workflow automation so workflow automation is the ability to do something like i mentioned earlier complex decision routing through uh automation on the back end of the system think of a change of major request is one that we use a lot as an example because that particular process happens a lot the estimation is over 10 of students change their major once between their first year through their junior year so it happens a lot and there's a lot of people involved generally the student has to take it to the dean and depending on um or depending on what happens they may either get approved or not approved typically their advisor is involved and then it needs to go to the register's office in order to log it into the system um and there may be again different levels of complexity of routing based upon that but it can touch a lot of hands and so a workflow automation system would make something like that a lot easier where you can build in both branching conditions and logic to route the approval at multiple steps every time an approval happens it would be logged and audited in the system with a timestamp of a date and generally speaking if an approval is in the system someone would know that it's waiting for them to log in and actually do something with the bad thing typically about workflow automation systems is depending on the system it can require someone from i.t or a business analyst to help support the experience so looking for a system that's easy to use is really important when you start thinking through workflow automation and the other thing that i'll mention which i think is illustrated here i'm going to use servicenow as an example because again that's a system we see on a lot of campuses um is that it's not like a system just does one of these things servicenow and or like a salesforce would typically have some type of e-sign module or assign tool integrated into that system as well as a series of other approval type tools where i can just go and click approve and that's logged and registered which could be counted as actual verifiable approval um so again servicenow their pricing model's a little more complex it's based upon revenue and users and a lot of potential add-ons in addition to that and so looking at these tools and figuring out which one is best for your institution and in order to offload some of that transaction-based e-sign pricing is definitely what i would recommend um i mentioned this before but just remember some tools just do one thing and some tools do multiple things so thinking about the things that i would recommend when you look at what tool do i need are you need to think about how well does this scale for our use case so what's the functionality how complex is it and complexity equates to access if a tool is more complex less people have access to it in the sense that they don't understand it and they need more training to use it and then thirdly how is this priced based upon the value i'm trying to derive from the tool and with power i think it's important to remember often but not always comes complexity and most tools are priced to do one thing really well an ecm traditionally came from an on-premises system and they've since moved to sas based model and a sas based pricing and but generally speaking whoever could access document was how they thought of value now that might not be the same value you want to drive if you're trying to roll out approval system across an entire campus so thinking about what value are you trying to derive from a use case and then looking for the tool whose pricing model aligns with that value set i think is a really good idea as you start looking at how do i save cost for looking at tools like esign tools so i want to talk a little bit about one tool set that fits in the model uh kuali build and helps do some of these things and could be used as an alternative to just esign tools quality build is a no code which again visual representation form and workflow builder it's actually only built for higher education quality was born out of higher education from a series of partners that said look tools on campus aren't doing this right now and we need to solve a need that's not being solved and ultimately it can do all of these things um it has the ability to do esign has digital forms built in with the ability to integrate with something like an ecm and or contain a set of documents within the actual system itself route a series of approvals and reviews across an entire campus and is natively built to be mobile friendly um and like i said about five years ago we went to a set of university partners and talked with cios who helped invest in building this product um and they said look we either have two types of tools on campus we either have things that are really powerful and complex like think your erp your ecm your um crm at certain campuses and while they meet its requirements they're often really complex to maintain and actually build with and so they're just not accessible to end users and then on the other side we see because of that these shadow systems pop up on on campus like google forms super easy and simple to use they are inexpensive but ultimately they're not meeting the business requirements it has and they're not scalable secure and reliable so there's this really great sweet spot between those two where they needed a tool that's actually easy to use and fun people actually want to log in and use it but is powerful reliable and scalable and actually meets the needs of i.t and while not being an insane expense or not being an unpredictable expense so i'll show you a few screenshots of build but then i want to walk through how you could think about replacing some of your current e-sign processes with something like a no-code app like build so this is a dashboard where i could easily log in create an application you can see i've got the new out button there um and uh do that with no technical training at all an example of what a form could look like and where it's branded i have drag and drop fields on my form and even i could have one of these fields being an eSignature field so i could have someone sign the form itself eSignature again is legally verifiable in canada and the united states i've got a really great drag-and-drop form builder so again no level of technical training is needed and i've got a ton of options not only with existing fields but also integrated fields so i can pull in my student information system from like a student id without having the form submitter actually need to know that information it would automatically populate when they log into the form you can see we have a signature gadget where i'd be able to either type draw or upload an image of my signature and again that would be verifiable on a form and then have the ability to do complex routing review and approvals after the form is submitted and so i could do something really simple like this we also have workflows where i think some institutions have 700 or more steps in which case they have branch conditions that literally you have to zoom out extensively to see because of the level of complexity that we find on some processes on campus so having a system to be able to support that and not only do that but also can integrate with line of business systems by default you can see that last step here push to system of record um where i as a business user without technical experience can drag and drop that onto the system without having to know how to do integrations or coding um just some quick quotes about build and this is from a variety of our partner our customers on the gartner peer review site but we focus really intently on design to make sure it's easy to use we actually i'll talk a little bit about the licensing model and how that can fit into looking at saving money on an e-sign tool we integrate really well and we focus on making sure that data isn't lost from one system to another and we actually deeply care about customers because we were born out of higher education and we innately understand the challenges of working in higher ed we want to make sure that we support however we can enabling more successful education experiences for students so this is an example of our pricing model which you can find on our website but what i want to call out in how we look at pricing builds specifically is that i like to call it adoption-based pricing because the thing that i that i struggle with with things like e-sign tools and having a transaction-based licensing model is that you're innately limiting you're innately increasing the risk as more people adopt the system whereas having a model that's built for higher education where if you allow more people to adopt the system and use it there's more transformation that happens a model like that scales better with the campus so our model is actually built off of a scale of it's a flat fee model that's built off of a scale of how many either students and faculty do you have on your campus or on different level plans like the starter and department how many people do you have in your department there's only one plan which is the very beginning plan where we limit based upon usage and that's just a base amount of apps that you can use and the amount of people who have access to the system but our institution or department plans really focus on you can use an unlimited number of applications an unlimited number of signatures for example um and actually really change your campus by enabling people to adopt and use the tool so while i say that i say that in the context of thinking of how do you save money with an e-sign tool well the first thing i would say is look at finding a tool whose pricing model aligns with what you're trying to achieve and then evaluate are there certain processes that i need to keep in a design tool like for example the legal contracts or um documents like tax documents that i can't really change the format of or are there processes that could actually work better be optimized and then be transitioned into a tool set with a more flexible pricing model the uh if you don't know about quality we came from about 15 years ago a set of institutions said look there's got to be a better way we can build software together and they formed a nonprofit where they built open source software specifically for higher education so we were born out of higher education we have five different products that serve different needs across the campus and quality build is our newest product that really can uh serve the needs of anyone on campus but ultimately we came from higher education and we deeply believe in connecting individuals in higher education to each other to more effectively solve business needs this is just a sample of some of the campuses that we currently work with today um and how some of them are changing their processes and transforming through use of a tool like quality build so that's what i've got for you today totally happy to stop and take questions um i'm gonna go ahead and stop sharing my screen and pull up my q a and see if we've got any questions that came through looks like we had one question about the use of another product for quality quality awards um the question is is build included or is it separate um currently build is a standalone platform so it could be used across an entire institution we have quite a few research customers that are using build to optimize um their research processes and it would be an add-on in addition to another module you can think of in addition to your current in this case quality awards module but one of the things i'd recommend if you're curious to know a little bit more about that um when we i'll send a follow-up email with the recording and we're more than happy to follow up we had a really good presentation from one of our customers at university of massachusetts amherst who talked about how they use build and coordination i believe they could be talking about the rewards module but at least some of the other modules of quality research so we are happy to follow up and provide that as well if you're curious to just know a little bit more about another equality customer using quality build we'll go ahead and let the question panel stay open for a little bit longer feel free to send any questions in about esign tools no code or quali happy to answer any of them okay looks like we don't have any more questions today so thank you all for joining appreciate hopefully you found this valuable if you have any questions we'll go ahead and be sending probably a follow-up email tomorrow with the event recording and feel free to respond to that or you can check out our website at build.kowali.com if you'd like to know a little bit more information and or if you'd like to request the uh slides for today's presentation have a great rest of your day and hopefully we'll talk again soon [Music] thanks