Challenge
When controls can't keep pace with complexity
For a $50 billion-plus multinational consumer goods company, commercial compliance is both a strategic priority and a complex operation of immense scale. With over $30 billion in auditable spend across global markets, the company manages thousands of suppliers, complex pricing arrangements, rebate programs, discount structures, and freight agreements, each varying by region, contract, and category.
The controls in place to protect this commercial value, however, were not keeping pace with that complexity. The company had limited proactive oversight of contractual terms, rebates, discounts, and credits. Across different markets, warehouses, and distribution centers, practices around managing returns, defective goods, and rejects were inconsistent. Pricing anomalies caused by purchase price variances were missed because teams were finding it difficult to update the source systems with price changes on time. And with multiple vendors carrying similar setup details, invoice processing was prone to error.
The company's existing recovery auditing program was generating a limited portion of the true recovery exposure. The business needed a smarter, more systematic way to find leakage, recover it, and minimize its recurrence.
Solution
From blind spots to continuous, AI-augmented control
Genpact took on the recovery program and redesigned it from the ground up, expanding its scope, sharpening its analytics, and introducing a structured three-phase post-payment audit (PPA) program tailored to the client's global complexity.
Phase 1 targeted core accounts payable recovery opportunities, duplicate payments, wrong-vendor payments, unrealized credits, and unadjusted advances.
Phase 2 delved deeper into supplier contract compliance: purchase price variances, pricing mismatches, incorrect rates, missed rebates and discounts, contract credits, and service-level noncompliance.
Phase 3 extended the program's reach to freight commercial terms, auditing overcharges, rate mismatches, accessorial billing, and invoicing on canceled orders.
Underpinning all three phases is a rigorous, AI-augmented end-to-end claim recovery workflow powered by Genpact's Post-Payment Audit solution. We started by consolidating and cleansing supplier transaction data, then applied risk-based analytics scripts and algorithms to surface variances and anomalies across structured datasets.
We extended audit coverage beyond structured data by deploying the Contract Analyzer module to ingest and interpret large volumes of unstructured data like invoices and contracts at scale. AI audit tools then cross-referenced these unstructured inputs against structured datasets, identifying exceptions and anomalies that traditional audit approaches can overlook. The result was a far richer, more complete picture of where financial leakage was occurring and why. Expert analysts joined a human/auditor-in-the-loop review step to validate exceptions before reaching out to suppliers for filing claims.
Powered by Xelix, invoice anomaly detection added a prevention layer designed to catch issues before they become losses. An intelligent rule-based supplier prioritization engine directed audit effort toward the highest-risk accounts payable areas.
Using Microsoft Power BI® dashboards gave stakeholders a deep dive into recovery progress, recommendations, and detailed root cause analyses to guide upstream process improvements.
Impact
Better recoveries. Strengthened governance
The results are accelerating. In the first full year, Genpact delivered recoveries of more than four times the historical baseline, growing annual recoveries to over $10 million against a prior run rate of around $2.2 million. The momentum continued to build in year two, with potential savings of $22.7 million* for the full year.
The program has evolved beyond a one-time recovery initiative into an ongoing, scalable approach. Missed rebates, supplier returns, pricing overcharges, and freight overpayments emerged as the primary sources of leakage and are now systematically tracked and addressed.
More than the financial returns, the client now has a continuous, intelligence-led audit and financial leakage prevention capability that delivers root cause insights, enables process fixes, and helps prevent leakage from recurring. The program has become a strategic lever for commercial controllership – supporting margin protection, improving supplier accountability, and strengthening financial governance at scale.
* Projected results based on initial estimates