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Accelerate Shipping Contract Management With AI-Integrated Solution

Industry:

  • Logistics

Service:

  • AI Development Service

Client’s Location:

  • Europe

About Client

Client is the world's largest international shipping association, with over 1,900 members from over 130 nations representing more than 60% of global tonnage. With an extensive knowledge base and many years of experience in the international maritime field, the Client plays the role of a professional and reliable organization, assisting maritime firms and entities with legal advice and contracting, providing practical advice to safeguard and add value to their businesses.

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The Situation

As a European shipping company with over a century of history, our Client's current system, developed over many years, requires significant technological innovation and system renewal.

Their primary concern centers around the SmartCons system, which provides shipping contract templates for maritime firms and entities to use and edit according to their preferences or usage needs. The current SmartCons system lacks user-friendliness, necessitating numerous steps to create contracts and lacks error-checking capabilities (checking whether the created contract has any problems, such as duplicates or conflicts).

Besides, since their service is based on a procedure involving various consultants and departments, it can be time-consuming when dealing with a large number of requests.

In pursuit of an improved user experience and enhanced service efficiency, the Client partnered with NTQ for a scalable, innovative solution driven by the desire to leverage AI for a competitive edge in their market.

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The Challenge

Requirements

Developing AI (NLP) engines designed as user-friendly tools for swift contract creation, offering expert assessment prior to transferring them to the law office for further processing. In details:

  • Build a solution to detect “pattern changes" in clause of shipping law contracts.

  • Suggest “model clause” per contract/clause and identify consequences of contract amendments.

  • Warn users when there are duplicate or conflicting clauses.

  • The contract can be changed over the time by different users but still based on some core clauses.

The new system can offer contract terms that match the new user's needs coming into the system by collecting changes from existing users.

Challenges

When developing an AI engine and applying it to the system, the biggest difficulty is knowledge based on law, needing to consult a lot of information from the Client's law office to be able to build a suitable solution. In addition, the Client's information is mainly confidential and sensitive information, so the team cannot directly work with the data but must wait for the Client to bring the data or perform pre-processing before sending it to the development team.

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The Solution

* Use NLP models to extract information from contracts, terms and provide reviews when users use SmartCons:

- Is the contract in conflict?

- Are the terms repeated?

- Suggest terms that should be modified/added/deleted

- Create the most common contract format for the entire system, reducing the amount of information that needs to be modified when creating a new contract

* Build topic modeling model to cluster Client's existing laws, helping law offices easily check and evaluate the business's existing articles. At the same time, use it to check for duplicate provisions in Client contracts.

* Build NER model to search and remove sensitive information in contracts (partner name, shipping route, contract value, ...) to encrypt the contract for storage purposes.

* Build a chatbot to support the law office in answering frequently asked questions from customers.

Technologies Used

Language and Frameworks

python
r
js

Machine Learning (Deep Learning)

google-bert
recommendation

Cloud Computing

azure
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The Results

Contract Insight solution helps the Client solve the problem in service delivery process and user experience. Client is satisfied with NTQ AI's solution and the results they delivered. NTQ AI continues to collaborate with customer to improve these capabilities while adding new features and implementations to boost the efficiency of the company's operations.

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Customer’s Thoughts

We value customer reviews because they are more valuable than any advertising.

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The NTQ team members are very positive, focused and hardworking. Despite time difference and Covid-19 the team has supported us well during our business hours.

It’s been a learning curve from both sides with language as a challenge. Understanding of our needs and issue has improved and overall we receive good quality solutions.

Personal relationship matter to us and as we plan to continue working together with NTQ we hope to meet one or more NTQ team members in the future.

Reviews from Clients, shared in a survey after the project.

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Open Gateway to Technology Excellence with NTQ Solution