In Brief
- Following a large acquisition, the client inherited 2,000+ unstructured Vendor Service Level Agreements across a highly regulated industry with no visibility into what they contained or what risk they carried
- Pierag deployed SmartXtract’s contract analysis agent: a customised, AI-enabled workflow combining automated data extraction, human expert validation and live data visualisation
- Planned review time reduced by over 60%. The client gained full portfolio visibility and new strategic capabilities across vendor negotiation, benchmarking and risk management.
The Situation
When a large enterprise acquires a business entity, it also acquires everything that business has signed. In this case, that meant over 2,000 Vendor Service Level Agreements — unstructured in format, scattered across repositories, and never comprehensively reviewed.
Operating in a highly regulated industry made this more than an operational headache. Outdated or expired contracts, non-compliant contractual terms, buried penalty clauses, rebate entitlements, and auto-renewal provisions created significant legal, regulatory, and financial exposure. With no central repository or common taxonomy, and contracts written in highly specialised industry language, the legal and procurement teams had no practical starting point.
Manual review was not a viable option. The volume was too large, the timeline too short, and the cost of a missed clause too high.
The Challenge
The Approach
Pierag deployed SmartXtract’s contract analysis agent configured for the client’s industry and contract portfolio through a six-step workflow designed to move every agreement from unstructured document to structured, actionable intelligence.
01 · Secure Contract Upload
All agreements ingested through a secure layer with full data confidentiality and audit traceability from day one.
02 · AI-Enabled Data Extraction
Proprietary models extracted and classified key fields across all agreements simultaneously – parties, term dates, Service Level Agreement obligations, penalty clauses, rebate terms, renewal conditions and niche industry-specific terminology.
03 · Human-in-the-Loop Review
Complex and ambiguous clauses routed to subject-matter experts ensuring accuracy where contractual nuance cannot be left to pattern recognition alone.
04 · Automated Dual-Model Validation
Every output cross-checked for consistency and completeness. Exceptions flagged before results moved forward.
05 · Data Protection
The tool was built on a stateless architecture ensuring no data left the client’s system during processing.
06 · Standardised Output
All contract data delivered in a uniform, structured format ready for immediate integration into legal, procurement and finance workflows.
07 · Data Visualisation
Extracted insights surfaced through a live dashboard giving leadership visibility into the full contract portfolio.
The Impact
60% reduction in planned review time from a projected six months to under two.
Beyond speed, the engagement delivered capabilities the client did not have before:
Operational Faster contract reviews at scale, improved transparency across the acquired portfolio, reliable extraction of critical clauses and terms, standardised outputs for analysis and reporting, and significantly reduced dependency on manual review — freeing the team for strategic and risk-focused work.
Strategic
- Vendor negotiation leverage: At renewal, the procurement team can access the dashboard, view the exact penalty framework against vendor performance and negotiate from evidence rather than assumption.
- Service Level Agreement benchmarking : Similar vendors – catering, IT services, logistics can now be compared on contractual terms, identifying who holds the most favourable conditions and where renegotiation is warranted.
- Concentration risk visibility : Leadership can see whether too many critical operational dependencies are tied to a single vendor group — and whether the contractual terms governing those relationships are adequate.
- Standardisation gaps identified : Older contracts lacking modern indemnification or penalty clauses have been surfaced and queued for remediation — giving legal a clear, sequenced workload.
- From reactive to proactive: Instead of digging through documents after a vendor failure, the team can see risk profiles instantly – and act before issues escalate.
About SmartXtract
SmartXtract is Pierag’s AI-agentic platform hosting specialised finance agents built for real use cases — contract analysis, technical accounting, reconciliations, reporting and more. Each agent mirrors the workflows of finance professionals by extracting data, interpreting standards and delivering structured outputs. Developed on Azure Platform, securely hosted and easily scalable, SmartXtract integrates with your data to provide accurate, actionable insights in real time.
Discover how Pierag’s AI & Digital lab helps organisations convert unstructured documents into actionable intelligence.
