Challenge
Sunstate Equipment, a construction equipment rental company, understands that managing risk is an essential part of the business.
The company is an industry leader, providing best-in-class equipment and tool rentals to partners in commercial construction, trench safety, and the industrial sector from location from coast to coast. Offering a wide fleet mix, ranging from backhoes and forklifts to pumps and air hammers, Sunstate’s goal is to make renting construction equipment as easy as possible by delivering a superior customer service experience.
In addition to complying with all applicable laws, Sunstate’s contracts are key to the company’s risk management efforts on both the customer and vendor side of the operation. On the customer side, standard rental contracts document the renter’s acknowledgment of risks; and on the vendor side, vendor contracts establish necessary insurance and licensing requirements. Larger accounts often introduce their own contract terms, further complicating matters.
Ensuring the company remained in compliance and its business partners were safe required extensive manual efforts. The company was seeking to increase efficiencies and enhance workflow automations.
Solution
To drive standardization and visibility across its operations, Sunstate turned to Icertis. The Icertis Contract Intelligence (ICI) platform offered Sunstate an advanced, cloud-based system that rationalized contract workflows and centralized critical compliance documentation — eliminating gaps and driving compliance.
With Icertis, Sunstate was able to set up standard rental procedures for every branch. Now, the right people see the right contracts at the right time. This ensures compliance checks — such as those around safety and insurance, or the documenting of a CDL or required certification on a rental for heavy equipment — are in place before business is conducted.
ICI’s artificial intelligence capabilities deliver further value, enabling contract managers to quickly extract pertinent information from third-party contracts and compare it to standard clauses for analysis.
Once signed, contracts are easy to find, since there’s now a single location for all contracts, including multi-year master contracts with customers.
Results
By using ICI to create a single source of contract information and develop new, centralized standard processes, Sunstate is simplifying its contract management platform and eliminating disconnects between departments.
The company’s risk managers can now easily stay on top of vendors’ insurance certificates and are alerted when the certification expires. Meanwhile, AI discovery is saving contract managers’ time and bringing peace of mind that critical contract language is not being overlooked.
For example, the company’s risk managers can now easily stay on top of vendors’ insurance certificates and are alerted when the certification expires.
Meanwhile, AI discovery is saving contract managers’ time and bringing peace of mind that critical contract language is not being overlooked.
Linda Jones, Contracts Manager at Sunstate Equipment, says, “Icertis Contract Intelligence has been a huge asset to Sunstate because it has departments and branch offices working in sync, and risk is being considered and addressed by everyone.
We’re protecting ourselves by dotting the Is and crossing all the Ts. We’re making sure the whole circle is protected, no matter whose hands a contract passes through. Everyone now has issues of compliance on their radar.”
