Cindy, far right, with region support specialist Kathy Watson, F&P manager Keisha Nelson and region support specialist Kristi Rayon.
When the manager of Cindy Rucker’s log team retired, they didn’t just leave a vacancy. They left a team of 18 people in varying states of transition — some brand new, some reassigned to different regions, some stepping into leadership roles for the first time. Overnight, a system that had worked well for years stopped working.
Cindy, who stepped into the manager role herself, could have steadied the ship and moved on. Instead, she took the disruption as an opportunity to rebuild the team’s work from the ground up, bringing each person along for every step of the journey.
“We took it back to square one,” Cindy says. “Where were we during that transition? Stressed, indifferent, disgruntled, divided, overwhelmed. We needed to reduce workload, even though the work never stops in Finance. Which meant we needed to find ways to work smarter.”
Under her leadership, the team embraced robotic process automation (RPA) to reduce or replace manual work, saving thousands of hours of manual work each year.
For her sustained innovation leadership and championing of our CuttingEdge innovation tool, Cindy was recognized as one of five recipients of our 2025 Innovator of the Year Awards. Launched in 2021, this annual award recognizes and celebrates employees who are driving improvements and fueling operational excellence through their ideas, actions, and the innovative environment they help create on their teams.
“The innovative ideas Cindy has championed boost efficiency by reducing the number of hours required to complete the team’s work,” says Aaron Welch, vice president of Southern Timberlands & Innovation. “That helps avoid overtime, reduces ergonomic strain of repetitive manual tasks and makes her Finance team an all-around safer and more rewarding place to work. The jobs Cindy and her team do are so important, and her innovations have made some of the most challenging parts of that work better.”
Finance & Planning managers visit the Log Team at our Hot Springs, Arkansas, office during the week-long cross-training event Cindy organized.
STARTING FROM SCRATCH
Cindy’s Log team, most based in Hot Springs, Arkansas, processes payment for every load hauled out of harvest units in Southern Timberlands — roughly 25,000 loads per week. When Cindy took over, the team was stretched thin and operating with excessive overtime. Morale was suffering, and employee feedback survey scores in the first year landed in the 40s and 50s.
Cindy’s response was methodical and inclusive. She worked with HR to clarify expectations and address policy gaps and created a succession structure by moving support specialists into leadership roles. She also launched a series of cross-training initiatives to help reduce friction between the Log team and the regional Finance and Planning managers they supported.
“I organized a week-long cross-training program in Hot Springs so managers in Finance and Planning could explore the full lifecycle of a load from harvesting and hauling to delivery and customer reconciliation,” Cindy says. “It broke down the ‘us versus them’ dynamic and built a stronger understanding across teams.”
The visits went both ways. Log team members traveled to the regions they support, building relationships and shared understanding that made day-to-day collaboration significantly smoother. Sub-teams formed to support cross-training, innovation and communication. A new hire presentation was developed and delivered for Southern Timberlands.
The results showed up in the numbers. Last year, the team’s lowest survey score was an 89.
“To take 40s and 50s up to 90s was absolutely an incredible feat,” Cindy says. “We can truly say that we are there.”
Cindy and the Log team at last year's groundbreaking ceremony for our new TimberStrand® plant in Monticello, Arkansas.
ONE GREAT IDEA LEADS TO ANOTHER… AND ANOTHER
With the team stabilized, the innovation accelerated. Cindy championed three automation projects that have fundamentally changed how the Log team works.
The first was an automated check detail retrieval bot, developed by Mary Yarbrough and Misty Chaffin, which replaced a daily manual process of logging into Wells Fargo, downloading individual reports and exporting electronic funds transfer information into Excel. The bot now captures all relevant transactions automatically and saves them to SharePoint — saving one to 1.5 hours daily.
The second came from an idea Misty had while mowing her yard on a Sunday afternoon. The team used an RPA system to standardize and store log load tickets, but each ticket still had to be opened individually.
“Misty called me and said, ‘I think I can write a consolidation script for these RPA tickets,’” Cindy recalls. “I was amazed. I told her, ‘Mow the yard more often, whatever you have to do to keep this up.’”
Misty’s script consolidates all tickets for a given customer and date into a single PDF file, replacing what was previously manual consolidation work. In 2025, the RPA system processed 334,675 tickets and saved the team 4,022 hours of manual work.
“We went from tickets saved individually in one spot where you had to click on each one, to Misty’s script where you open one PDF, to now building a BI report where all your information will just be there,” Cindy says. “It keeps evolving.”
The third innovation, led by team leader Stephany Gollon, was a standardized SharePoint site that serves as a single destination for all processes, procedures and onboarding materials. It replaced a fragmented folder structure that sent new hires digging through state-by-state files.
And the tools have been replicated beyond Cindy’s Log team. Western Timberlands, which previously stored physical ticket copies in boxes, has fully eliminated hard copy tickets.
Cindy with three of the other four Innovator of the Year winners at our recent Innovation Summit at our Seattle Headquarters.
MARINATING IN AN INNOVATION MINDSET
Cindy is the first to admit she used to live by the motto, ‘If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.’ That changed when she took on the manager role and realized the team needed change — and needed her to lead it.
“Anytime someone comes to me with an idea, we’re going to approach it head-on,” she says. “Inclusiveness is crucial on a team this size. Everybody has to be in the know and have a voice. When people feel informed and involved, they’re much more willing to support new ideas.”
Cindy’s advice for anyone navigating similar hurdles is simple: just take action.
“If you want to try something, do it,” she says. “If it doesn’t work, fail quickly and try again. But staying stuck is not an option.”
Cindy’s next goal is zero exceptions: every single load in Southern Timberlands processed and paid every week, no matter what.
“My new motto is, ‘No load left behind,’” Cindy says. “If we don’t process loads, people don’t get paid. Revenue doesn’t get booked. That matters.”
