How Foundation Software cut contract creation time by 93% with PandaDoc CPQ

The challenge

Foundation Software's sales team was operating across five workspaces, 80 templates, and six different contract cover pages — a fragmented setup that created confusion, errors, and delays to getting documents out. With reps generating up to ten contracts per day in a high-volume environment, every minute of friction compounded fast.

The solution

PandaDoc gave Foundation Software the tools to consolidate everything into a single template, workspace, and workflow. Sales Operations Manager Alexis Lindway brought a Lean Six Sigma methodology to the implementation that shaped how PandaDoc was rolled out and adopted across teams.

From accounting platform to multi-brand operations

Based in Ohio, Foundation Software is a 41-year-old construction software developer that serves commercial, industrial, and government construction companies across the United States. While their flagship construction accounting system, FOUNDATION® accounting, is a direct competitor to the likes of both QuickBooks and Spectrum, Foundation has grown through strategic acquisitions into a family of six brands, including Payroll4Construction®  (payroll processing services), WorkMax® (time tracking), McCormick Systems® and Estimating Edge® (estimating), HQ Suite (an assortment of construction apps), and FOUNDATION Pay® (expense and pay management) — each with its own products, contracts, and sales processes.

Managing all of that falls to Alexis and her team, who process every sale across every brand. When she joined, she inherited a document environment that had grown without a plan, and she immediately recognized it for what it was: a waste problem.

"A lot of the time that gets wasted is sales staff having to email us asking which template to use, templates not working, or things not transitioning effectively," said Alexis. "Should the process go through its entire life cycle and my team catches that something is incorrect on that contract, it creates more inefficiency and waste, as well as potential issues with the client, having them re-sign a contract."

In a sales environment generating 30–40 contracts per day, that kind of waste adds up fast.

The methodology behind the implementation

Before Alexis thought about which features to use or how to deploy a configure-price-quote (CPQ) solution, she did something most ops leaders skip: She defined the problem properly. She brought that discipline from her background as a Lean Six Sigma Yellow Belt, a process improvement methodology built around a simple idea.

"Lean Six Sigma methodology is basically the accumulation of how you can make something more efficient — removal of waste," she explained. "The methodology, as you keep rising up the ladder, is basically: How do you find and remove the waste, whether that's time, money, or resources. Then, once you adopt that process, you have to find ways to make the rest of the team adopt it. You can't have one without the other."

Adoption is one of the most challenging parts of any new software implementation. Teams configure the tool, process change, and then fail to use it the way it was intended because changing behavior is harder than changing software.

Alexis knew this going in. When PandaDoc CPQ became available, she framed the implementation as a process redesign. The question wasn't "How do we implement this?" It was "What does good actually look like, and how do we get everyone there?"

Her answer was ruthless simplification. Foundation Software was running 80 templates across five workspaces with six different contract cover pages — a direct result of M&A growth without centralized governance. Her target state was one template, one workspace, one cover page, and one source of truth across teams.

"We are one company, but we have multiple brands," she said. "It was time to simplify and create one mode of truth. Salesforce is our model of truth, and this PandaDoc template should be the same."

The transition to PandaDoc CPQ

With the goal defined, Alexis built the implementation plan the same way she'd build any process improvement project: start with the hardest case, prove the model, then scale.

PandaDoc CPQ is a guided selling tool built directly inside PandaDoc's agreement platform. It lets sales reps build accurate, branded contracts and proposals by moving through a structured workflow. First, the revops team configures the software to their catalog and creates deal-specific playbooks. Then reps are able to apply the correct pricing automatically and generate a ready-to-send quote, all without leaving the CRM. 

For Foundation Software, whose reps were manually hunting through 80 templates to piece together the right contract, that kind of process was exactly the fix the environment needed. Alexis and her team set the rules and product bundles upfront, so reps could build quotes without guesswork, missed add-ons, or compatibility errors.

Rather than rolling CPQ out across all 34 sales reps at once, she started with a pilot team of three — people she chose because they sold across multiple brands, understood the complexity, and would give her honest feedback.

"I wanted to do the hardest product arrangement first because everything else for the other brands is basically a one-to-one," she explained. "We had a team of three on board for 2–3 months specifically because we knew they would be open with the issues. They were very articulate, familiar with the software, and had interdisciplinary brands that they sold together."

The logic behind that approach was to flush out every edge case at a small scale, so by the time the full organization came on board, the hard problems were already solved. It also meant she could give the pilot group her full attention and, when something broke, fix it before it became a systemic issue.

"While you can plan as much as you want," she said, "human beings will find those corners you didn't yet explore."

From the pilot team, she moved brand by brand, saving Foundation Software (the most complex brand with the most product combinations) for last. The full implementation ran from July 2025 through April 2026: nine months of negotiation, coding, vetting, and staged adoption.

"What I appreciated was the persistence of PandaDoc to listen to true, honest feedback and meet our needs. Our implementation specialist was always available and always helpful. If we weren't able to meet, he would record the solution. We shared solutions together that they're able to use for future clients. Once you understood where those pieces were, the thousand-piece puzzle came together."

Making adoption stick

Getting 34 salespeople to use the new system was its own challenge, and Alexis knew exactly why. Resistance to change isn't always stubbornness, sometimes it's comfort.

So, Alexis chose her champions carefully and selected people she knew would push through the hard parts and bring the skeptics along with them.

"You have to find the people that you know will trudge through the worst parts of it with you," she said. "Twenty percent of your people will be 80% of the noise, so how are those champions going to help that group realize you've reached the simplicity you promised?"

When skeptics pushed back, her pitch was concrete: "You're literally going to hit a button five times. You're hitting next, next, next, next, done. You don't have to search for templates anymore."

That framing stuck. Within months of full adoption, reps weren't asking which template to use anymore — they were just clicking through and moving on.

Impacting the bottom line

Foundation Software went from 80 templates across five workspaces to a single template in a single workspace. Contract creation time dropped from 5–15 minutes to just under one minute — a 93% reduction. In Q1 2026 alone, the team generated 2,300 contracts, 1,600 of them through the CPQ environment, recovering an estimated 240 hours that had previously been lost to manual document creation.

Error rates dropped just as sharply. Before CPQ, Alexis's team was stopping the process to correct inaccurate contracts up to five times per week. Now, it occurs once a week at most, and often not at all.

"Going from 15 minutes to one doesn't seem too drastic," Alexis acknowledged, "but in Q1 we sent 2,300 contracts, so when you add it up, that's quite a lot."

The full contract cycle from creation to client signature now runs in under two hours, with clients spending an average of 36 minutes actively reviewing the documents they receive. The process that used to create confusion at every handoff now runs with almost no intervention.

The impact extended beyond the sales team, too. Foundation Software's HR department has since adopted PandaDoc for its own documents, a direct result of the credibility the sales rollout earned. Alexis, meanwhile, has enrolled in PandaDoc's AI beta program, already thinking about what comes next.

"PandaDoc has become even more of a trusted partner," she said. "Every implementation is going to start rough when you're making massive changes. But if you see that improvement, it just skyrockets and goes up — and it really did."

We went from 80 templates across five workspaces to one template, one workspace, one contract page. To me, that is everything. That's what CPQ did for us.

Alexis Lindway

Sales Operations Manager at Foundation Software