Digitalizing Contract Management at US Methanol

US Methanol LLC is a US methanol producer headquartered in Charleston, West Virginia. The company was founded in 2016 by the KKCG investment group – the same group that Aricoma belongs to. Its Liberty One plant in Institute, West Virginia, started production in 2023; with a capacity of roughly 200,000 tonnes of methanol per year and an investment of over USD 250 million, it ranks among the region's most significant industrial projects. Methanol from Liberty One serves as a key feedstock for the chemical industry across the US East Coast.
 

US Methanol was wrestling with a long-standing problem in its contract records. There was no single overview of which contracts were valid, from when to when, and who owned them – and above all no timely warning that a contract was approaching its end date and needed to be extended with an amendment. Without one, the expiration of an important contract could simply slip through.

The customer weighed several solution options. Three criteria proved decisive: the solution had to be simple, the customer's own team had to be able to administer it without programming skills, and it could not bring any additional licensing costs – meaning it had to run in the Microsoft 365 environment and ecosystem the company already owns. That is exactly why the low-code approach proposed by Aricoma won: a Power Apps canvas application over a SharePoint Online data model, with automation in Power Automate. The fact that US Methanol and Aricoma belong to the same KKCG group played its part as well.

The project goal was therefore to build a single central contract register with controlled access, visual validity tracking, automatic pre-expiration notifications and a complete document history including amendments – without introducing yet another standalone system.
 

Aricoma designed and delivered the Contract Management System – a Microsoft Power Apps canvas application built from modern Power Platform data components and deployed under US Methanol's corporate branding. The application is the single home for the entire contract lifecycle: from creating a draft through activation, amendment management and expiration tracking to archiving. Regular users browse and search contracts; administrators additionally create, edit and archive contracts and add amendments.

SharePoint Online forms the data and document layer: the Contracts, ContractDocuments and NotificationRequests lists hold metadata and relationships, while a document library stores the individual contract and amendment PDFs under an automatic naming convention. Permissions are governed by SharePoint/Microsoft 365 groups (system admins, contract admins, contributors, readers) – the app verifies the user's roles via an automated flow at sign-in and enables features accordingly.
 

Automation is handled by four Power Automate cloud flows: file import, user-role evaluation, and a pair of flows that generate and send notifications about approaching contract expirations. The whole solution is packaged as a Power Platform solution, enabling controlled deployment across development, test and production environments.

The implementation ran from April to July 2026 – roughly three months – including joint testing with the customer. Operating experience confirms the original expectations: the customer values the simple, clear single-place records, the unambiguous identification of contract owners, easy findability thanks to full-text search, and the automation that watches contract validity on its behalf.