IBM - Award for Innovation in Sales

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: Award for Innovation in Sales - Technology Industries

Nomination Title: Quote to Cash Rapid Analyzer - Next Generation of Legal Support with AI

IBM Quote-to-Cash (Q2C) Operations comprises various shared services functions within IBM’s Finance and Operations. In IBM’s transformation into a Premier Cognitive Enterprise, driving integrated value in Speed, Efficiency and Advocacy are key outcomes that will differentiate IBM from its competitors. The Q2C Operations has been at the forefront of this transformation journey, which saw integration and alignment of teams and systems across multiple business functions.

Q2C provides support for IBM's sellers for pre-sales and post-sales support, such as managing a bid, developing a proposal, qualifying a reference during the pre-sales process, or managing the post-sales order and invoice processing. During the pre-sales process, IBM seller needs to react fast, while reading and understanding hundreds of clauses containing the tender specifications. The client team would engage Legal, contract and negotiation and other colleagues to thoroughly comb and analyse the Terms&Conditions in the document. Assisted by Q2C, the Legal or C&N professional would need to manually assess each clause and generate the list of key issues for the team. This work often comes at the last minute and could be critical for the business. As new documents are often like previous tenders, the work is very repetitive, creating new innovation opportunity.

Q2C Rapid Analyser (QRA) is a first of a kind cognitive application with ‘continuous learning’ capability that revolutionizes the way we support IBM sellers with artificial intelligence (AI). QRA is a template-based and ‘continuous learning’ cognitive tool for analysing the terms and conditions in a request for proposal document. It is injecting AI in Legal as it helps automate the assessment of terms and conditions in document through augmented intelligence approach. The tool is powered by AI technologies such as IBM Watson and a custom-developed natural language processing (NLP) text extraction algorithm with an IBM Cloudant non-structured database at the backend. The user interface is built using Angular and Node JS.

The following processes were subject to several transformations using QRA:

Manual and tedious document analysis process that created bottlenecks in responding to request for proposals or contract preparation.

Centralizing document repository so that documents are easily accessible to provide point of reference or template.

Contract document review process where communications are mostly done offline, leading to longer turnaround time and potentially high attrition rate.

The value & business results

QRA brings 99% improvement in operational efficiency for every document analyzed as compared to manual process.

Efficiency improvement: users can focus more time on value creation in proposals and responding faster to clients.

Revolutionizing how Q2C works with Legal and other stakeholders: Multiple stakeholders from different functions involved in a tender exercise could collaborate and instantly be notified if a clause requires their attention.

QRA was initially developed to tackle and solve a major business problem that impacts Q2C Operations, Legal teams, Sellers, and other stakeholders. The initial request was to design a cognitive application that can solve the manual and tedious document analysis process. Nonetheless, the team has gone beyond what was originally requested as QRA was subsequently expanded to help our internal clients in solving additional major issues such as lack of common repository and platform for facilitating collaboration using augmented intelligence technology. The following features make QRA stand out in supporting sales activity:

Customized extraction & clause analyses in a specific domain
Perform analysis with pre-trained domain knowledge
Identify clauses found in condition of contract documents
Export report into Excel/ work format

Understand multiple languages
English
Simplified Chinese (New)
Traditional Chinese (New)

Clause-level analysis
Compare against historical or template clauses
Upload new & reference document for real-time comparison

AI-driven
System will improve with more usage
Key issues derived from similar standard clauses
Match to standard clauses from different countries


Prescriptive functionalities
Display historical assessment results & preapproval status
Assign & notify aligned function

Patent: Concept understanding method to detect unidentifiable textual paragraphs/sentences and concepts from the context. Invention Disclosure No: P202009731