Have you ever been lost in folders of supplier documents? Trying to understand which ones are out of date? Combing through countless data points to see which ones are even relevant to the compliance initiative?
During the data collection process, it’s common to be overwhelmed by the different types of documents and data points your suppliers provide you. There are over 15 different types of documents that outline product material information, and even more that address company-wide policies.
We recently undertook a larger-than-normal project here at Source Intelligence - applying artificial intelligence (AI) to the compliance process. Why? After 10 years in the industry, we’ve seen that the variation in supplier documentation creates a huge burden on the document review portion of a compliance program.
We estimate that it takes an average of 5 minutes to manually review and extract data from a document. If your compliance program, for example, has over 1,000 products in scope, each product has at least 30 components and your component suppliers provide you 15 different types of documents with potentially acceptable data points...you get where this is going. Our analysts estimate that document review is responsible for over 75% of time spent on a compliance program, and the variation in document type, language and other factors make the document review process the most challenging part of compliance.
To process compliance documents on a large scale used to take a lot of time, money and resources. After years of working on solutions to the document review process, we decided to build an AI-driven solution to the problem. Being a software company, we knew that technological innovation was the only scalable solution to this problem. Putting some of our best minds to work here at Source Intelligence, we built machine learning algorithms to automatically process compliance documents - while this is in the early stages of production, we’ve seen dramatic reductions in the time spent and overall cost of document review.
Using large sets of compliance data and millions of documents collected over the last 10 years has allowed us to build and train robust document review engines. These engines can accurately analyze thousands of compliance documents in seconds and generate results that drive highly efficient compliance reporting programs.
Industry-leading innovation is how we became the top global compliance partner for companies of all sizes. Using AI to enhance the supply chain compliance process was a natural next step in our evolution and I’m very excited to see where the future takes us.
Click here to learn more about AI powered compliance and automated document review.
As founding partner and Source Intelligence’s President & CTO, Matt Thorn leads the company’s global operations, IT development team and Business Operations Center. Thorn is the driving force behind the SI technology platform and unique solution associated with providing supply chain transparency services for some of the world’s most recognizable brand names. Since helping found the company, Thorn has driven a strong track record of results, execution excellence, and improved efficiency while also driving the company to deliver the highest level of customer satisfaction. Prior to Source Intelligence, Thorn played key roles in operations within the telecommunications and security industries in addition to his work as a research and development expert for the British Military.