Partner and supplier onboarding use case | Docusign

Partner and supplier onboarding is often a complicated and complex process that is fraught with risk. While even discovering an appropriate partner or supplier can be a real challenge, it is only the beginning of onboarding work: working with a new partner or supplier requires due diligence review, agreement negotiation, onboarding with your software systems, ongoing monitoring, and, eventually, possibly termination when conditions change. Each of these stages needs many standardized steps and recording of agreements. If a step is skipped or improperly addressed, it can incur real risk in the form of data breaches, HR issues, physical disasters, and unmet regulatory requirements.

As a developer, your solution for managing these steps and the risks associated with them has a major impact on the quality and safety of your onboarding process.

How Docusign for Developers can help

Docusign for Developers provides services that you can use to simplify and consolidate the partner and supplier onboarding process. To get started, you can create a free Docusign developer account to explore and test the tools discussed below in a dedicated sandbox environment. Let’s review these technologies and how each of them can be used for this purpose.

Docusign Workflow-Builder

Docusign Workflow Builder is a low-code tool that enables you to create and manage automated, reusable, end-to-end business workflows. Steps in a workflow can incorporate agreements, identity verification, user input via web forms, your extension apps, and more; once you create a workflow, you can create and provision instances of it as needed.

For partner and supplier onboarding, Workflow Builder workflows can:

Help your organization implement consistent processes and review steps by defining and reusing workflows.
Consolidate and simplify your workflows. Workflow Builder supports multiple execution paths depending on signer inputs, reducing the need to define additional workflows for edge cases or different variations on a single business process.
Help you meet regulatory requirements. When a review is required, your app can trigger the appropriate workflow to alert stakeholders and ensure that it is performed.
Maintain security by implementing identity verification, such as form validation or ID checks.

Agreement Manager API

Docusign Agreement Manager extracts and shares AI-read insights from all of your agreements in a repository. You can use the data provided by the API to analyze your existing agreements, extract insights, and connect agreement data to your business systems.

For partner and supplier onboarding, Docusign Agreement Manager can:

Improve the visibility for the agreement status without manually tracking agreement metadata. Agreement Manager will automatically expose data from your agreements for you to query and track.
Help you manage agreements in any status. By adding data for dates of review, renewal, signoff, etc., you can use Agreement Manager to filter and find agreement workflows that need immediate attention. For example, if you need to receive an annual regulatory compliance review for a supplier, you can create a notification that runs a Agreement Manager query and alerts a user for every agreement whose review is approaching.
Provide copilot or large language model (LLM) integration between your systems and your agreements. Your copilot or LLM can construct queries from these questions and make Agreement Manager API requests to retrieve agreement data. After the desired agreement data is returned, your copilot or LLM can interpret the response back into a natural language response to your user.

Image of a UI screen showing navigator agreement attributes.

Data IO extension

Data IO is used to send data back and forth from your systems to agreements being signed using Docusign eSignature that are part of a workflow. You can build a private extension app that uses data IO to send account information to your own proprietary system as part of an onboarding workflow.

For partner and supplier onboarding, the data IO extension can help you build a centralized and streamlined system that handles your onboarding processes.

Connected fields extension

The connected fields extension validates signer-entered data against data from your system of record in real time and enables you to auto-complete validated field values for other documents in your agreement. Onboarding scenarios typically include many documents; connected fields enable your users to validate once and propagate those values throughout the entire stack of documents. This saves time and cuts down on errors.

File output cloud storage extension

The File output cloud storage extension extension enables you to automatically archive the final, signed PDF and its associated audit trail safely in your company’s main storage, like SharePoint, Box, or Google Drive. This eliminates the need to manually download or re-upload anything, ensures that no data your company needs will be lost, and helps you establish a single source of truth for your records.

Web Forms API

The Web Forms feature enables you to build web pages that contain fields in which users enter data. User-entered form values can be dynamically incorporated into eSignature envelopes that users sign, as well as being exported to your business applications. With the Web Forms API, you can create and manage instances of web forms that users fill out and embed web forms into your own applications.

For partner and supplier onboarding, web forms enable you to prompt users to enter data, which is then used for eSignature or a subsequent step in a workflow.

Private extension apps

When onboarding customers, you’ll likely want to store their information in proprietary internal systems. With private extension apps, you can extend Docusign workflows with data IO extensions to read and write data from those systems without making your app public for external distribution.

A screenshot of the screen where you submit your private extension app for review

Developer resources

To get you started on building your own partner and supplier onboarding solution using Docusign for Developers, here are a few useful resources:

Know Your Customer (KYC) workflow template: You can use this template to prepopulate a no-code workflow in Workflow Builder with everything you need to verify a new customer’s identity and collect their information. It includes steps that use web forms, ID verification (IDV), and conditional logic that branches depending on the success of the IDV step.
The Web Forms Builder: The Web Forms Builder is where you can create web forms to collect customer data. Web forms can be leveraged in Workflows so any data input by the customer can be easily referenced in other workflow steps.
How to trigger a Workflow Builder workflow: This code example showcases how you can use the Workflow Builder API to programmatically start a workflow. You can then embed the workflow inside an iframe in your web application. Use this to trigger onboarding workflows directly from inside your own web app.
From NIGO to STP: A developer’s guide to custom data verification and the Connected Fields API: This comprehensive blog post provides useful information about using the connected fields extension to provide custom data verification for your organization’s needs. You can build highly customized extension apps that are tailored to your organization’s specific requirements for the partner and supplier onboarding process. Read this blog post to see how this is done with examples that include both product screenshots and code snippets.
Plan a Web Forms API integration: This guide walks you through everything you need to know to build web forms into your API integrations. From authentication to rendering web form instances with the Docusign JS client SDK, this guide has you covered.
How to create and embed a web form instance: This code example demonstrates how to create web form instances and embed them into your applications to provide users with a seamless form-filling experience.
Build an extension app: This guide covers the general steps to build an extension app, including how to decide which extension type to use and how to set up IT infrastructure like an API proxy.
Data IO Reference Implementation: This reference implementation models the implementation of data input and output functionalities in an extension app. To use an extension app reference implementation, clone the project files from GitHub and follow the step-by-step instructions provided in the README file located in the root folder of each implementation.
How to create a workspace: This code example demonstrates how to create a workspace through the API, providing users with a consolidated view of all envelopes, documents, and tasks related to a particular agreement process.