Leading Sugar Producer Streamlines Contract Management with Generative AI

Challenges

Central America’s leading sugar producer has an annual production volume of over 1.2 million tons of sugar and by-products. The company maintains relationships with hundreds of vendors and manages a complex supply chain.

As the company expanded operations over the years, the number of contracts under management increased significantly, exceeding a thousand individual contracts across various languages for a single location. Consequently, the company’s procurement team is challenged in effectively managing and monitoring these contracts.

Prior to engaging C3 AI, procurement analysts grappled with the manual management of thousands of contracts in multiple languages. Tasks such as information retrieval, contract term comparisons, and issue identification were labor-intensive and time-consuming.

Approach

In pursuit of a technology-driven remedy, the company selected C3 Generative AI for its robust enterprise access control, swift deployment capability, and scalable architecture.

Over a 16-week period, the C3 AI team integrated over 600 contracts into a unified knowledge source. This involved configuring translation pipelines for multi-language support during data ingestion and inference, implementing automated metadata extraction to facilitate explicit filtering during user search, and fine-tuning the system for high response accuracy.

Leveraging C3 Generative AI, procurement analysts can swiftly and accurately access specific insights, such as terms and conditions, timelines, and involved parties, that previously required extensive manual effort. C3 Generative AI enables effortless comparison of hundreds of contracts, identification of overlaps in providers and services, and diligent tracking of compliance with contract terms.

Since the initial deployment, the company has experienced over 80% response accuracy and identified up to $5M in savings from accelerated contract consolidation. Encouraged by these outcomes, the company is expanding the deployment scope to include additional contracts and procurement analysts. Furthermore, the company is also implementing additional use cases to fully harness the transformative capabilities of C3 Generative AI across its operations.

About the Company

• Leading producer of sugar, molasses, alcohol, and other sugarcane by-products
• 4 facilities in three countries
• 8,000+ FTEs
• $1B+ revenue

Project Objectives

• Streamline contract management including monitoring compliance with contract terms and ensuring timely service levels.
• Easily identify overlapping vendors and services for consolidation across hundreds of contracts.

Project Highlights

• Multi-lingual (Spanish and English) interaction support, both at document ingestion and querying
• 600+ vendor contracts (unstructured text data) integrated
• Support explicit filtering to identify specific contracts manually
• Configured and fine-tuned a novel RAG (retrieval augmented generation) system on specific company data