M+E Daily

Over 5 million organizations rely on Adobe Acrobat to securely create, edit, e-sign and collaborate on PDFs to keep their businesses moving — and growing. But there are ways Acrobat can be used to drive even more productivity, Adobe managers said July 26, during the webinar “Unlocking Efficiency with Adobe Acrobat.”

During the webinar, Adobe provided insights into how three organizations leverage Acrobat as a comprehensive document management system that integrates with other key software they use, including apps from Microsoft.

Adobe shared real-world success stories and demonstrated how teams across an organization can drive productivity by creating secure, standardized document processes.

Viewers were able to learn about automating manual processes for faster — and more collaborative — document creation, boosting security with password protection and redaction of sensitive information, and integrating smooth e-signature processes for added workflow speed and security.

“Our goal today is to make individual employees’ jobs easier,” making their teams more productive, according to Alexa Farrow, product success manager, Adobe Document Cloud.

“We will walk through three different scenarios where Adobe Acrobat is essential to the organization’s success,” she said.

“We’ll first talk about protecting sensitive information and share Arizona Pipeline’s journey of digital transformation,” she noted. That will be followed by a discussion of “collaborating on PDFs, using Adobe as our use case,” she pointed out. Last will be a discussion on “constructing a digital workflow for seamless electronic signatures,” showing how Coval Homes uses integrated e-signature workflows to speed up its work, she said.

“Every organization is at a different stage of digital maturity,” she pointed out, noting some are still “completely manual and paper-based,” some are “completely digital and automated,” and the rest somewhere in the middle.

“I tend to find that organizations from every industry who fall on the higher end of the scale are preparing their teams across the entire business by standardizing on Adobe Acrobat and Document Cloud,” she said.

“There are several capabilities that organizations are benefiting from, in addition to basic editing and organizing PDF files,” she said, calling Acrobat an “incredibly powerful tool to effectively automate internal and external workflows and support overall growth.”

She pointed to three good reasons to centralize on Acrobat for all employees: Ensure every document is secure and compliant; increase efficiency with integrations and mobile; and enable automation with high-fidelity content. Farrow called security and compliance, integrations and mobile access, and automation the three “pillars of centralizing your workflows on Acrobat.”

Security and compliance mitigate errors and security breach risks, safeguarding a brand’s reputation, she noted. Integration and mobile access, meanwhile, enables users to get more done faster with apps they already use – from anywhere, she said.

And automation accelerates manual, repetitive tasks and frees up time and resources for a team, she added.

On the other hand, manual or siloed processes represent a threat to a business because customers and employees experience delays and dissatisfaction, errors and redundancies increase costs, physical resource expenses continue to skyrocket, and security and compliance risks continue to increase, she explained.

Timothy Plumer, senior manager, digital media strategy at Adobe, went on to demonstrate each of the features available, “so you can see up close how easy it is to do this all on your own,” according to Farrow.