Roseburg Pulls Contract List in 90 Seconds with IntelAgree
“The templates have been incredibly valuable for our lawyers because they allow us not to focus on the standard things we’ve already got in place, but to work on the extra stuff that you don’t anticipate.”
About Roseburg Forest Products Co.
Roseburg Forest Products Co., a family-owned wood products company, has headquarters in Springfield, Oregon. The company was founded in 1936, grows and harvests its own timber, and manufactures lumber, plywood, engineered wood, and medium-density fiberboard. It operates 10 facilities across the United States and Canada.
Overview
Handshake integrity has long been a core value at Roseburg Forest Products Co. (Roseburg), a family-owned wood products manufacturer. Before IntelAgree, the contracts behind that value lived with individual mills and departments across the U.S. and Canada, with no central storage. Terms varied from mill to mill, and gathering the contracts for a deal could take weeks.
Roseburg rolled out IntelAgree alongside a new company-wide contracting policy. Today, Deputy General Counsel Berit Everhart and Compliance and Legal Project Manager Amanda Ragan work together on that policy and on how teams follow it.
With IntelAgree, Roseburg maintains contracts in one searchable system. Legal approved the language for about 30 templates, and non-lawyer teams generate standard agreements from them. Everhart notices that each new template increases adoption of the system and results in more coordinated storage of contracts in system, which allows for greater efficiencies in contract management and triage. In 2023, when Roseburg divested of its particleboard mill in Louisiana, IntelAgree allows the team to generate a list of the mill’s contracts in about 90 seconds.
Key Challenges
- Difficulty retrieving agreements for scope-of-work questions and asset sales
- Inconsistent terms from mill to mill, with each site contracting on its own terms
- A lean legal team supporting contracting for a workforce that spans the U.S. and Canada
Building on Handshake Integrity with Contracts at Their Fingertips
Before IntelAgree, the various teams throughout the organization took the lead on managing their contracts. The environmental team managed environmental agreements, and purchasing agents at each mill managed the contracts and order forms the mill required. With no single place to store contracts, teams had less visibility into what other parts of the company had signed.
With IntelAgree, one system holds Roseburg’s contracts, and over 200 people can access it, with permissions varying by contract type. The system empowers the legal team to help internal clients understand an existing contract or find terms the team has used before that work for them. That record of past agreements gives the legal team a reference point whenever a client asks.
Their new contracting system has a downstream effect across mills, departments, and corporate teams. “The ease of visibility throughout the system on contracting is significantly greater, because now it’s not contracts held by various teams across the organization. That’s the number one value to me, having a centralized place where we can start putting all this stuff so that we can search it and folks can see what other parts of the organization are doing,” Everhart said.
That matters on capital projects, where Roseburg can quickly confirm what a vendor agreed to deliver or the terms that a vendor has agreed to on other projects.
“Being able to pull real-time information to hold our teams accountable to what they agreed to, and also hold our vendors accountable to what they agreed to, is a big value add.”
Legal’s Templates Give Non-Legal Teams Confidence
About 30 live templates let Roseburg’s non-lawyer teams generate standard agreements from legal-approved language. Everhart’s goal is for any team member to generate an agreement with a click, using as few inputs as possible, and for the system to store it automatically.
“It is about empowering our non-lawyer team members to know that if you have this problem and use this form, you are doing the right thing.”
The templates include a standardized transportation agreement for hiring transportation vendors. When employees need an NDA, they get it from IntelAgree, in place of the many versions the company signed before.
For the claims release form, which Roseburg uses when product is damaged in transit, legal no longer needs to review the form as long as the standard version is used. “It has significantly reduced time, friction, and back-and-forth on the things we see weekly, if not daily, throughout the system,” Everhart said.
Roseburg’s legal team has historically been lean. “The templates have been incredibly valuable for our lawyers because they allow us not to focus on the standard things we’ve already got in place, but to work on the extra stuff that you don’t anticipate,” Ragan said. Standard requests to legal for a specific type of agreement tend to drop once a template covers it. The more teams use Roseburg’s own paper, the easier it is to move agreements through the system.
Closing the Loop on Visibility and Signatures
The mills focus on running the business, but finance still has to account for what they sign. Giving the corporate controller access to mill-level contracts through IntelAgree allowed finance to see what was going on and which contracts were coming through without a lot of emails. Legal can also give finance leadership access to the same contracts, including the leases and energy contracts a mill enters into.
Signature requests now come from Roseburg’s own contracts email address, a sender vendors and other counterparties expect.
“We can help our internal clients look really professional with the business deals they’re doing, whether that’s giving them standardized language or a way to send out a contract for signature.”
Before, signing often happened outside IntelAgree, so some records lacked the signed contract, which added time and friction associated tracking down the final, signed versions from the applicable business team. Roseburg now sends more agreements for signature through IntelAgree, which stores the signed copy automatically. “Closing that loop was a big win,” Everhart said.
What matters most to the board, legal, and risk is shaping which uses of IntelAgree Everhart and Ragan focus on first, such as capturing every agreement and signing in the system. They plan to build on those and add more from there.
“It helps support the professionalism and hard work of our team members, that they have a tool that gives them finger-point-click access to the things they need to support their roles.”