Overview
The Midpeninsula Regional Open Space District (Midpen) — which manages more than 65,000 acres of public land in the San Francisco Bay Area — replaced a manual contract routing process with a completely electronic workflow.
Impact
The solution has increased transparency and improved efficiency. Everyone now has insight into the contract routing process. Staff can look up their own contracts or those of other staff members, see who has signed the documents, who needs to sign them next and how long contracts have been waiting for the next signer to respond. An electronic signature platform has made the routing process instantaneous and enabled staff to work remotely.
Advice
The solution is built using three components: DocuSign, SharePoint and Microsoft Power Automate. DocuSign provides the electronic signature platform. It was chosen for its usability and unique features. It also provides a programming interface that allowed Midpen to build a dashboard.
SharePoint hosts the dashboard. It was built using a list to store each contract route. A web part page is then used to display the status of active and recently completed routes. Power Automate provides the glue between the two systems. Midpen configured an HTTP endpoint in Power Automate to receive the webhook request from DocuSign (this HTTP endpoint is a premium feature that requires a special license in Power Automate). The payload from the webhook is then parsed to build a list of staff who have signed the contract and a list of staff who have pending actions. This information is then updated in the SharePoint list for the corresponding contract via a SharePoint REST endpoint.
