IBM - Sales Turnaround of the Year
Company: IBM, Armonk, NY
Company Description: IBM is a values-based enterprise of individuals who create & apply technology to make the world work better. Today, more than 400,000 IBM employees around the world invent and integrate hardware, software and services to help forward-thinking enterprises, institutions and people succeed on a smarter planet.
Nomination Category: Sales Awards Achievement Categories
Nomination Sub Category: Sales Turnaround of the Year
Nomination Title: Infusing AI into Enterprise Contract Lifecycle Management (ECLM)
Enterprise Contract Lifecycle Management (ECLM) is a key component of Lead-to-Cash organization for managing both “buy” side and “sell” side of contracts. IBM is transforming processes and technology to deliver best-in-class contracting experience by reducing complexity, improving turnaround time and increasing transparency in the contract lifecycle powered by AI.
There are 3 key tasks associated with ECLM
Template Administration - Prepare Templates - Streamlined development, localization and maintenance of the standard contract templates
Contract Lifecycle Management Enablement
Draft Content - Quickly assemble contracts from a controlled set of pre-defined templates
Execution - Optimize the contract lifecycle from creation to signature, with backend integrations
Enterprise Contract Repository (ECR) - Store & Manage - Single location to store, manage and gain insights on signed contracts performance
IBM has infused AI in all 3 stages of contracts by developing solutions powered by Watson, IBM research deep learning and machine learning models, Word embeddings based on Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT) etc.. These are used by different persona in various stages of contracts and has proven to be successful in all phases of ECLM helping to drastically reduce turnaround times, while reducing complexity and improving user and client experience.
Outline the nominated achievement since July 1 2019 that you wish to bring to the judges' attention (up to 250 words):
AI in ECLM helps IBM to reduce cycle time in contracts processes, improve the quality of contracts being signed, resulting in higher client satisfaction.
These solutions generate yearly productivity savings equal to $9M USD, largely due to reduced cycle (turnaround) time, improved quality and speed.
Contract Advisor (CA) yearly estimated benefits ($4M USD) are driven by a combination of factors: optimized process for contract preparation leveraging AI recommendations on optimal clauses to include per Client/Industry/Market, acceleration of template and contract preparation, reduction of time spent negotiating and iterating on contract versions in addition to financial gain driven by reduced collection cycle time.
Contracting Language Analyzer (CLA) has helped IBM improve the quality of contracts being signed, resulting in higher client satisfaction and a reduction in the number of projects with profit erosion. In the last year from August 2019 (initial MVP) up to August 2020, thousands of documents were processed through CLA, with roughly 400 unique users. More than 20,740 working hours saved for Sales / Risk Managers. This helped to increase productivity ($2.4M USD productivity savings) and reduce E2E cycle time to close deals.
Smart Vault, enables practitioners with finding key contractual elements in timely manner, providing productivity savings for Legal & C&N professionals equal to $2.6M USD per year.
Reference any attachments of supporting materials throughout this nomination and how they provide evidence of the claims you have made in this nomination (up to 250 words):
The following materials provide more details on each of the solutions that are referenced in the section above:
AI in ECLM outlines the space that each of these solutions plays in: https: //ibm.box.com/s/4aiqy9eavc0c84t9wac2nxxmw6yd76hm
The following set of documents provides more details on each of the solutions:
Contract Advisor Overview: https: //ibm.box.com/s/xyxkqvivbonomo4jguxnkpiowgb1jjrv
Contract Language Analyzer Overview: https: //ibm.box.com/s/p97vwlvdr46egwkmxvqio0qmqi5kakab Smart Vault Overview: https: //ibm.box.com/s/peo572vmohl91ejjtaf3x2bxwimi6uxo
Explain why the achievement you have highlighted is unique or significant. If possible compare the achievement to the performance of other players in your industry and/or to the nominee's past performance (up to 250 words):
IBM’s AI in ECLM is designed to offer a fully cognitive-enabled sales experience through the use of embedded AI (including IBM Watson technology), natural language processing, and advanced analytics within the E2E Contract Lifecycle management to drive productivity & speed.
Contract Advisor facilitates the migration of 4000+ IBM template documents into a standardized clause library that streamlines the clauses across IBM templates and facilitates maintenance of template documents further down the line, as the clauses in the clause library have the associated metadata to associate localization, template type and other relevant fields. To this end, future updates to a clause that is used across multiple templates can be made in the single clause in the library and then automatically cascaded down to each of the template documents created thereafter.
The Contracting Language Analyzer helps IBM improve the quality of contracts being signed, resulting in higher client satisfaction and a reduction in the number of projects with profit erosion. This capability, which uses Watson cognitive capabilities, has helped to put the right level of predictive data in the hands of the users at the right point in time during the life cycle of the project to make them take the most informed judgement and provide them with the ability to do timely intervention and mitigate losses, either pre contract signed or during project launch.
Smart Vault leverages AI to search through thousands of documents to extract relevant documents at the clause level, as well as compare contracts at an immense scale.