How Smart DCC Transformed its Contract Management Function, Extracting 110,000 Obligations Across 220+ Contracts and Eliminating Days of Manual Work.

Organisation:  Smart DCC      Industry: Energy / Critical National Infrastructure

Contract signed:  March 2025

 

110,000
Obligations extracted across all contracts
90%
Time savings,
from 1 day to 20 minutes
1,600
Documents processed in less than 30 days
55k
Pages processed through AI
c800
Colleagues with self-service access

 

BACKGROUND

Managing the UK’s smart metering infrastructure on spreadsheets

Smart DCC is responsible for running the UK’s national smart metering infrastructure, overseeing a complex portfolio of fully and partially managed contracts across its Design, Build and Run (DBR) function. With contracts running to 1,000 pages each and a regulatory obligation to categorise and report on every clause, the contract management team faced a mounting administrative burden.

John Sherlock, Senior Contract Manager with nearly 17 years of contract management experience, was brought in to lead the transformation of DCC’s contract and supplier management function. His team’s biggest daily challenge was clear: a manual, spreadsheet-driven process that could not scale.

“
We came from a time where everything was within spreadsheets, PDFs, Word files. Going through 30, 40 documents, about 1,000 pages at a time, for a single contract, just to answer one internal question."
John Sherlock, Senior Contract Manager, Smart DCC
THE CHALLENGE

 

When Manual Processes Cannot Keep Pace with Regulatory Demands

DCC’s challenges were both structural and operational. A contract of 1,000 pages should contain between 3,000 and 4,000 obligations, but the supplier-produced spreadsheets were returning figures in the hundreds, focused only on obligations the supplier deemed critical.

The team needed to independently scrutinise and categorise every obligation across a growing estate of contracts. Every change control meant starting the review process again.

 

The Challenges

→ Obligations tracked in inconsistently formatted spreadsheets

→ Subjective interpretation of obligation categories (time-bound, triggered, unbound)

→ Every change control required a full manual re-review

→ No central view for annual/monthly reporting

→ Wider business could not self-serve; all queries were routed through the Contract team

→ Supplier-submitted obligations were incomplete and lacked independent scrutiny

What Was Needed

→ Automated, consistent obligation extraction at scale

→ Standardised categorisation applied uniformly across all contracts

→ A single source of truth for all contract data

→ A platform secure enough for a regulated, critical national infrastructure operator

→ An interface simple enough for 800 non-specialist colleagues

→ A partner willing to build unique logic around DCC’s contractual language

WHY BROOKLYN SOLUTIONS

 

Security, Intelligence, and a Platform that Already had AI Built-In

DCC ran a structured procurement process, including market investigation, RFIs, and live demonstrations from multiple vendors. Brooklyn Solutions stood out on three dimensions.

Security and data sovereignty. As a regulated operator, DCC required a completely ring-fenced environment. Brooklyn’s architecture gave the team confidence their data would never leave a controlled boundary.

Genuine AI, not keyword search. Other platforms could extract obligations but relied on keyword matching. Brooklyn’s prompt engineering and machine-learning approach meant it could understand word association, context, and the unique contractual language used across DCC’s supplier base. Crucially, the team could help build that logic directly into the platform.

AI capability available on day one. Competitors were still developing AI features. Brooklyn could demonstrate them live, in a simple interface, at the point of procurement.

“
You had it there today. You could demonstrate it and it was within a simple interface. If I’m sharing this with 800 colleagues, training becomes very simple. There are a few clicks and you’re there.”
John Sherlock, Senior Contract Manager, Smart DCC
THE SOLUTION

 

A Centralised Contract Intelligence Platform Built around DCC’s Language

Working closely with the Brooklyn team, DCC built out a production environment that automated obligation extraction across its entire contract estate. Brooklyn was configured to understand DCC’s specific obligation taxonomy, time-bound, triggered, and unbound, applying tags consistently and automatically. This removed the subjective manual interpretation that had previously caused inconsistency.

The platform was rolled out beyond the contract management team to functions across the business, giving colleagues a conversational interface to ask plain-English questions directly of their contracts and receive answers in seconds rather than hours or days.

Where previously a change control would mean a full manual re-review, the platform now keeps obligation data current automatically. Reporting for regulators, which once meant reconciling multiple spreadsheets in different formats, now takes a single export.

 

RESULTS

 

110,000 Obligations. One platform. Questions Answered in Minutes.

 

110,000
Obligations automatically extracted across 220+ contracts, far exceeding the hundreds previously tracked manually
1,600+
Documents ingested and made searchable, with data that updates through change control automatically
1 click
To export all 110,000 obligations for regulators or suppliers in a single, consistent format
Minutes
To answer contract queries that previously required a day of manual review across PDF documents
c.800
Colleagues are now able to self-serve contract intelligence without routing every question through the team
Zero
Subjective inconsistency in obligation categorisation. AI applies the same logic to every clause, every time
“
Every function we’ve shown this to is impressed. Every one of them wants access immediately, because they can answer a question in 20 minutes rather than a day of going through manual contracts.”
John Sherlock, Senior Contract Manager, Smart DCC

THE PARTNERSHIP

A Vendor Relationship that feels like Something Else Entirely

For John Sherlock, what distinguishes the Brooklyn relationship as much as the platform itself is the nature of the collaboration. DCC brought deep domain expertise, 17 years of contract management and deep knowledge of National Audit Office (NAO) and Crown Commercial Services (CCS) frameworks and regulatory standards and found a partner genuinely willing to absorb and act on it.

Concepts Brooklyn’s team had never encountered, such as the time-bound, triggered and unbound taxonomy, were taken seriously, tested collaboratively, and are now core to how the platform operates for DCC and beyond.

Response times are near-immediate. Sessions happen in person when complex requirements demand it. The Brooklyn CEO, CTO and COO invest their own time directly. New capabilities are shared openly, with DCC feeding into the product roadmap.

“
It has felt more of a partnership than just a vendor. Your willingness to listen, to work with us, and the people, has given us confidence we definitely chose the right company.”
John Sherlock, Senior Contract Manager, Smart DCC

Brooklyn Solutions in Three Words

1
Collaborative
Every challenge, every idea, every ask was met with genuine engagement and follow-through.
2
Flexible
No concept too novel, no requirement too specific. Willing to get around the table and work through it.
3
Progressive
Continuously evolving with weekly releases, a visible roadmap, and a team that shows what is coming next.

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Brooklyn Solutions   |   Customer Case Study   |   Smart DCC