Business Situation
Hachette UK - the second largest book publishing company in its country - is required by the term of the UK copyright to retain legal and vendor agreements for the life of an author, plus 70 years. The company needed to have continuous access to those documents and it also wanted to replace manual paperwork and existing software that was limiting. Hachette UK sought technologies that could:
- Reduce expensive, time-consuming and error-prone manual efforts
- Accelerate digitalisation of paper records
- Free up staff for value-add work
- Offer a consistent and accessible user interface for all employees (compliant with Web Content Accessibility Guidelines)
- Make it easy for every employee to explore documents within a database for the entire organisation
“Work with the Avanade team was great. I was really impressed with how quickly they got to know the terms of contracts and expressions used in our industry. There was so much demonstration throughout, and that we were able to test so frequently was great.”
Solution
Familiar with Avanade from engagements developing intelligent automation solutions, Hachette UK selected us to validate automated identification and cataloging of key entities. We created a scalable architecture that ingests, prepares and transforms large volumes of data from a variety of sources and machine learning models that identify patterns across contracts. Our London Digital Innovation Studios team listened to Hachette UK employees before developing a web app that enables contextual search and visualisation in Microsoft Azure cloud.
Results
Now that Hachette UK has brought all its information together in a single source of reliable data, employees feel an ownership that encourages them to act decisively and immediately, within roles managed in the bespoke solution. Early successes include:
- Immediate, self-service location of information
- 90% accuracy in data extraction and key entity identification
- Direct connectivity and daily updates from the company’s bibliographic database
- Reclaimed employee hours formerly spent searching for and labelling data
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Hachette UK enables employees with machine learning-driven contract searches
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