How FARLEP-INVEST Connected 1,759 Business Partners to Electronic Document Management and Reduced Document Approval Time by 36 Times

For a nationwide telecommunications company, this level of adoption cannot be achieved through internal changes alone. It requires hundreds of external partners across different regions of the country to embrace new ways of working. That is why onboarding business partners became one of the most challenging — and ultimately one of the most important — stages of Vega’s digital transformation.

One of the key stages of the transformation was migrating external business partners to electronic document management. The biggest challenge was convincing 1,759 partners, many of whom had never used a Qualified Electronic Signature (QES) or worked with electronic documents before.

To ensure a successful transition, the team:

• trained partners to work with electronic document management;
• helped them obtain and configure QES;
• supported their first electronic signing sessions;
• adapted business processes for new users.

As a result, Vega successfully migrated its partner network to electronic document management, eliminated paper-based document delivery, removed the need for physical signatures, and reduced logistics costs by approximately UAH 340 per document.

In practice, the company digitalized not only its own internal processes but also collaboration with partners across Ukraine.

Before implementing electronic document management (EDM), documents from regional offices had to be sent to the company’s headquarters for review and approval before being returned to employees or business partners for execution.

As a result, documents spent days moving between locations, approval cycles were slow, and employees had to manually track document statuses and search for the correct files. To speed up the process, scanned copies were often used as a temporary workaround.

To eliminate these bottlenecks, Vega first conducted a comprehensive review of its document workflows. The team mapped approval routes, delegated signing authority to regional managers, and gradually migrated contracts with business partners as well as primary accounting documents to an electronic format.

Read also: Electronic Primary Documents: Which Electronic Documents Must Be Reflected in Accounting

For a telecommunications provider, signing a contract is only the beginning of the process.

Once a contract is approved, multiple downstream activities immediately begin, including technical assessments, financial approvals, procurement, project execution, and the signing of completion documents.

That is why even a minor delay in approving a single document can affect dozens of employees simultaneously. As long as a contract remains in the approval stage, the next phases of the project cannot begin.

After implementing electronic document management, Vega reduced its average document approval time from three days to just two hours. This enabled the company to:

• launch new projects more quickly;
• accelerate procurement approvals;
• shorten the time between agreement and project execution;
• respond to customer requests faster.

For Vega, faster document workflows have become more than an operational improvement — they represent a tangible competitive advantage.

Read also: Vchasno service ecosystem: how to unify document workflow, signatures, logistics, and HR into one controlled process

At Vega, every major transformation initiative is measured by its business impact.

As part of the project, the company successfully decommissioned its previous electronic document management system and migrated the majority of its document workflows to Vchasno.

Interestingly, shortly after the rollout, the team encountered an unexpected challenge: the number of printed documents began to increase.

It turned out that some employees continued printing documents even after they had already been electronically signed, despite there being no legal or operational need to do so.

The experience reinforced an important lesson: digital transformation is not only about implementing new technologies. It is equally about changing long-established habits and helping people embrace new ways of working.

The next stage of development is the integration of Vchasno with the company’s internal IT systems, the expansion of the electronic archive, and the further involvement of counterparties in digital processes.

The company sees this as a natural continuation of its transformation. While the first stage made it possible to convert documents into electronic format and speed up their approval, the next stage should ensure even closer interaction between document workflow and internal business processes.

The Vchasno ecosystem makes it possible not only to work with documents but also to build end-to-end digital processes through integrations, an electronic archive, and automation of interaction between employees and counterparties. These are the capabilities the company plans to use at the next stages of digitalization.