Graymont Replaces Document Chaos with Virtual Minute Book & Automated Compliance Tracking 

With over 70 years of experience, Graymont is a leading lime and limestone producer known for its strong commitment to environmental stewardship and sustainability. Partnering with Grupo Calidra in Latin America, Graymont is crucial in steelmaking, paper production, and water treatment, serving industries in North America and Asia-Pacific.

Their extensive operations present unique challenges, like navigating environmental regulations in multiple regions, managing complex supply chains, and balancing growth with sustainability efforts. To ensure seamless operations in these areas, it is critical to have quick and secure access to accurate information, including entity data and compliance management.

“Our document management system used to be a bit disorganized. We saved all our entity documents on Windows Explorer in different folders,” says Vashti Hamilton, Paralegal at Graymont. 

“People saved documents in different ways and locations, sometimes duplicating them in multiple folders. So, not really knowing which document is the true version was a big challenge for our team,” adds Vashti. 

Recognizing this challenge, especially with the increasing pace of projects and legal inquiries, Graymont sought a more efficient entity management process. 

In 2022, Graymont’s Corporate Secretary decided to implement an automated entity management solution. After reviewing a few platforms, they chose Athennian because of its ease of use and user-friendly UI. 

“One of the things that I love about Athennian is their automated reports. Being able to track entity and compliance data in one place instead of manually updating different spreadsheets is a huge time saver for us,” says Vashti. 

Previously, storing documents inside Windows Explorer was causing delays in entity data access, inaccurate data sources, multiple folder management, and excessive reliance on external counsel.

Now, with Athennian, Graymont’s legal team has moved its virtual minute book and compliance tracking to Athennian’s central platform and have brought a lot of their legal processes in house. 

A robust home for 100% accurate insights for the legal team

One of the features Graymont's legal team currently uses is Athennian's search functionality. They can quickly find and retrieve accurate information for compliance, reporting, entity management, and similar tasks. 

With Athennian, they can search across a broad set of fields, including entity name, business name registration, previous names, tax ID number, minute books, document file number and more. This provides a wide-reaching capability to find various types of entity-related information quickly.

This feature eliminates the once tedious task of sifting through numerous folders on a network drive. It allows Graymont to quickly locate precise documents, whether verifying signatories or identifying ownership during international transactions. 

"With Athennian, accessing everything is now much simpler and more efficient than navigating through our network and sifting through countless folders. I would consider Athennian to be our Bible. It's just easier to log into Athennian and pull up whatever document we are looking for," says Vashti.

Combatting multiple compliance deadlines with automated tracking and reminders

For Graymont, Athenninan's automated compliance tracking was a game-changer and easily fit their compliance model. The integrated reminders synced directly with email platforms like Outlook, providing timely alerts to entire teams. This ensured shared accountability and kept everyone informed without requiring manual entry across multiple calendars.

"I love that you can generate reminder emails straight to your Outlook. I deal with a lot of annual compliance matters for the APAC region. Athennian allows me to send reminder emails to our lawyer in Australia and me to manage our compliance. It's great because it keeps us accountable and cuts down a lot of manual work we previously did," notes Vashti.

By automating repetitive and manual compliance tasks like tracking deadlines on a spreadsheet, Graymont can focus on strategic activities rather than routine checks. This shift increases operational efficiency and reduces the likelihood of human error and missed deadlines in the compliance processes​. 

Now, teams can also maintain an accessible audit trail of compliance-related actions and documentation. This readiness supports internal and external audits, making it easier to provide necessary documentation and evidence without scrambling during audit periods​.

Organizing documents to build an easily accessible and traceable business insights

At the moment, Vashti primarily uses Athennian to manage their virtual minute book and track compliance. Her goal is to bring as much data and documents inside Athennian as possible and get the rest of the team on-boarded so they all work through a central system. 

“So, my vision is to have Athennian be the central platform for all our entity and compliance-related projects, like our trademark, templates, virtual minute book, shareholdings, summary reports of our entities — everything,” explains Vashti.

To get there quickly, Vashti’s next move is to continue migrating data into Athennian and onboard more team members into the platform by working closely with the support team. 

“The customer support team at Athennian is exceptional. It is one of the most responsive platforms that I’ve seen in my career as a paralegal. Whenever I’ve had any questions, Athennian’s support team has gotten back to me within minutes with a support article or training video. It’s above and beyond anything I’ve experienced before” says Vashti.

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