Massive Entertainment: Minimising administrative tasks
With Scrive's help, Massive Entertainment, a Ubisoft studio, were able to digitalise their NDA processes, reducing admin by 50%.
With Scrive's help, Massive Entertainment, a Ubisoft studio, were able to digitalise their NDA processes, reducing admin by 50%.
Founded in 1997 and part of the Ubisoft family since 2008, Massive Entertainment – a Ubisoft Studio is a world leading game studio based in Malmö, Sweden. Massive Entertainment brought the record-breaking new IP Tom Clancy’s The Division® to players around the world in 2016. The game quickly became the fastest selling game in Ubisoft history. The game also played a key part in the creation of the in-house engine Snowdrop, which today is used at Ubisoft studios all around the world.
With the release of Tom Clancy’s The Division® 2 in 2019, the studio once again proved its expertise and innovation, allowing Tom Clancy’s The Division franchise to become a billion-dollar brand, reaching over 40 million players worldwide.
Massive Entertainment is currently leading the development of Avatar™: Frontiers of Pandora set in the world of James Cameron’s prominent Avatar™ film franchise and collaborating with Disney and Lucasfilm Games on Star Wars™ Outlaws.
NDAs were initially handled by Massive’s reception but it quickly became an insurmountable task so it was moved to their project teams. However, with the sheer amount of agreements they had to send, that quickly spiralled out of control as well.
These were sent out via email or Teams and issues quickly arose, with incomplete agreements coming back, missing or filled in with incorrect information making the already time consuming process an even bigger hassle. It became clear that Massive needed another solution for this.
In 2018, Massive Entertainment’s HR department started to use Scrive for the employment contracts. During the pandemic Massive were then forced to find a way to sign NDAs & contracts remotely.
It was at this point that HR Administration Lead, Martina Gebert Andkvist and our Procurement Specialist, Josefin Enertz came up with the idea to scale up the usage of Scrive to not only cover the studio and HR but also the projects and this was later approved by the team who owned the process from the beginning.
Before the decision was made to work with Scrive they did investigate other alternatives as well to make sure to cover all aspects of working digitally with contracts and NDAs. During that time, they did look at alternatives but in the end, it was more beneficial to continue with Scrive.
For Massive Entertainment, eSign Online is used for the general usage for sending contracts & NDAs. It is used by all groups that have this need, from reception and finance to HR and the projects. The standard usage of sending one or a couple of NDAs is used directly in eSign Online or by using the bulk send if there’s a higher number of documents to be sent out.
The API implementation happened at a later stage when new policies and processes had been implemented and the ownership got transferred to the projects to handle their own NDAs. With an increase in the number of documents sent, the team started to lose track of who had signed what and when.
They started to use a SharePoint online list to track who should receive the NDA and if it was signed or not. To be able to make this process smooth they created a Microsoft form that got connected to their SharePoint list so that people could request their NDAs directly in the form. This process made it easier to track the incoming numbers but also to have a directory over who had signed it historically. But there was still room for improvement.
As mentioned before, a big factor in this decision was to save time. Too much time was spent on sending and managing NDAs and it was affecting daily tasks related to big projects. Being able to utilise Scrive’s API to automate the NDA process, integrating Power Automate and SharePoint directly into the signing process.
This solution made it possible for people to request NDAs and to easily send them out as well as automate an email to the requester with the status of the NDA. When it’s signed, Scrive updates the list which deploys an email to the requester letting them know that it now has been signed. This makes sure that less time is spent on handling NDAs and more time is freed up to work on projects.
“My role was never intended to be administrative regarding paperwork and NDAs. But it needed to be handled by a project hence it landed on my table since I was responsible for access management and our infrastructure. By using automations, Microsoft and Scrive API we managed to save time spent on admin and NDAs to get back into focusing on our projects instead. We saved hours over a duration of a couple of months, each iteration improved our way of working and saved more time.”
Torbjörn Andersson – Collaboration Tool Specialist, Massive Entertainment
Massive Entertainment managed to shave off almost 50% of time spent even when the solution was only partially implemented. Currently they spend around 1 min per case which is to verify that the right person gets the right template and the flow sends the NDAs in a matter of seconds.
As is to be expected for a major player in the gaming industry, NDAs play a big part in Massive’s day to day operations. Working with some of the best known intellectual property in the world, including Star Wars and Avatar, as well as wanting to maintain the element of surprise for players, the importance of NDAs cannot be overstated.
There are so many moving parts as well, people visiting the studio, working on the project or even just someone who might get more information regarding projects via a presentation, making the process of NDAs a real cornerstone in knowledge sharing internally as well as externally.
But sending out hundreds of agreements at once to sign is a big project and Massive quickly realised their process was too manual and involved. Not only sending the agreements but tracking them and responding to individual requesters with status updates. With paper based processes, archiving also posed its own set of challenges.
By utilising a mix of eSign Online and API, Massive Entertainment are able to focus entirely on creating engaging, award winning video games loved by players all over the world, minimising the administrative tasks that previously took up a significant amount of time.
"We spent so much time handling NDAs that it was interfering with our daily work. The ones handling the NDAs do this on top of their daily work and have very limited time. With the NDAs we needed to drop everything else if we got a big request, sometimes hundreds of NDAs to send at a time!"
In Scrive you get more than just one contact person, you quickly get a team of people ready to assist you with your needs. From Account Manager to Technical support. They are all very eager to help and to come with improvements or ideas.
With the time spent on NDAs cut in half, a huge amount of time is freed up to focus on daily work and bigger projects.
eSign Online is Scrive’s electronic signature portal. E-signing is quickly becoming the standard in an increasingly digital world. Adopting electronic signatures into your business processes.
Seamlessly integrate the full power of Scrive’s easy-to-use and secure eSign API, guided every step of the way by Scrive’s expert support team.
Request a meeting so you can tell us what you’re trying to solve, and we can look at how Scrive can streamline your business processes and bring value to your organisation.
