Otava, Finland’s top book publishing company, partnered with CGI to explore how AI could automate and streamline contract reviews. Traditionally, reviewing and extracting key information from long documents was done manually by employees. Otava wanted to automate tedious document reviews so that its employees could focus on more meaningful tasks.
"For contract management, AI is an excellent and efficient resource that frees up our employees’ time from manual work so they can focus on other tasks. We've already managed to reduce the time it takes to process contracts to a fraction of what it was before."
Reijo Tanttu, Otava's Information Management Manager
The solution
AI was brought in to take on the work of reviewing, extracting and entering the required information into the company’s contract management system. While AI can quicken the review process, for quality control and accuracy, Otava’s employees always conduct a final review and approval. For additional security, the solution was implemented in the company’s Microsoft Azure cloud service environment, ensuring all processed data remain under Otava's control throughout. In the trial phase, the biggest question was whether it was possible for the new AI models to extract key information from different contract formats.
"Before implementing the new AI large language model (LLM), this required the use of uniform contract formats. With the new language models, it was time to see how AI can cope with the complex reasoning needed to find key information without having to train it separately for each contract format," said Timo Herrala, CGI Software Engineer, responsible for the technical implementation of the AI portion of this project.
Otava uses CGI’s enterprise resource planning (ERP) system, CGI Profio360, to process its contract documents. This solution covers all supply chain functions from production and operations to finance and sales. Contract management enhanced by the solution’s AI major language models is one of CGI Profio360's latest features. It uses industry best practices to streamline project-driven business processes and increase information and operational transparency. Furthermore, our AI and automation capabilities can scale with project sizes and business growth.
In the future, this solution is expected to bring more concrete benefits to Otava, and the plan is to continue developing AI solutions to further streamline the company’s processes.
