AI Case Study
British Telecom saves an estimated £100M a year using the automated contract analysis platform RAVN
BT has been using RAVN contract analysis technology to analyse its commercial contract documents and extract key provisions from them, with estimated savings of £100m a year.
Industry
Telecommunications
Fixed Line And Integrated Telecommunications Services
Project Overview
Legal IT Insider reports that "BT has for the past year been working with RAVN Systems within its group revenue and margin assurance team. The team reviews the commercial contracts that BT enters into in order to maintain BT’s profitability by ensuring that contracts are accurate and that no unexpected changes have been made. RAVN’s contract analysis software automates the review process and can quickly pick up any changes made to the contract by the contracting party."
From Prism Legal: "The business objective is to manage rights and obligations, both owed to company and owed to counter parties. Technology allows semi-automation of extraction of provisions and priorities... The key is to extract the relevant provisions, irrespective of the documents in which they sit. BT tracks provisions by obligation category (time-bound, triggered, unbound), priority (critical, proactive, reactive), and scope (contracting entity, counter party, shared). It tracks metadata such as due date, timeframe audit evidence, clause path, assigned to, and clause type. Allocation of ownership drives from category, scheduled and 'service tower' (job function). Obligation status has a workflow to track assignment (assignment request, acceptance, declined), status (on-track, in-jeopardy, past due), and closure (submitted, closed)."
Reported Results
BT claims an estimated £100M a year in savings. In terms of the capabilities of the automation process, 30 contracts were put through the program as of October 2016, and 56K obligations were identified, and security classifications made with 99.5% precision and 99.2% recall.
Technology
Function
Finance
Accounting And Reporting
Background
According to Prism Legal, "BT has looked at how best to manage commitments. BT has introduced automation to extract provisions and tag them to support improve customer alignment. This can be hard because complex agreements may have 1000s of provisions."
Benefits
Data
Contract documents; Legal Prism reports that "BT contract management is integrated into Salesforce.com. Data are piped into global data warehouse. Contracts are also pushed into a document management system."