Finance and supply chain optimization with AI process mining

Imagine running a supply chain where you can't see the friction until it stops everything. That's where this company found itself, drowning in massive amounts of data, but unable to use it. Manual operations meant missed insights, delayed actions, and mounting risks. Without a dedicated tool for duplicate payment recovery audits or insights into vendor balances, the team was always reacting, never ahead. The result? Friction that threatened the stability of the company's supply chain and market reputation.

It faced a perfect storm:

• Broken trust: Payment disputes led 11 vendors to halt business, leaving shelves empty and reputation and working capital at risk

• Massive backlogs: Nearly $93 million in open GRIR items, aged beyond 90 days

• Financial leaks: $15 million in historical duplicate invoices, driven by daily manual extraction of SAP reports

• Piled-up debit balance: Inaccurate aging of the supplier debit balance in the database, leading to high turnaround time (TAT) and untimely follow-ups

• Blind spots: Lack of visibility into supplier payment terms meant working capital wasn't optimized
   

The status quo was expensive and unsustainable. The retail pharmacy company needed a new way of working.

We didn't just patch the process; we reimagined it using Celonis as a value discovery platform. By integrating data from the data lake, we mapped specific use cases to their core processes – P2P, AP, claims, and supply chain – and deployed targeted solutions to transform them.

Real-time intelligence

We replaced manual dispute management with a GRIR data intelligence layer. The system now identifies, classifies, prioritizes, and resolves GRIR reconciliation end to end. It's a move from reactive dispute management to proactively understanding root causes and remediations, such as upstream process gaps and invalid deductions, before they become disputes.

Stopping the cash drain

We deployed a Duplicate Invoice Checker using Celonis' AI/ML capability. This tool identifies potential duplicates in SAP in real time and helps block duplicate payments based on audit rules before the money leaves the account.

Proactive recovery

For vendor debit balances, we replaced manual databases with automated triggers to enable timely follow-ups, validations, and daily reporting of suppliers with debit balances for faster recovery.

Future-ready ops

The solution also integrates Celonis' gen AI capabilities to stop teams from drowning in unstructured supplier notes. It analyzes responses, detects sentiment, and pinpoints risk to prioritize collections. It turns messy data into actionable insights, guiding teams for faster follow-ups and escalations.

Pay term rationalization

A powerful Celonis dashboard delivered clear insights on vendor payment terms versus spending, days payable outstanding (DPO), and material price trends. A simulation model determined the top contributors (vendors) by total spend and optimum payment terms for each, empowering the retail pharmacy for smarter negotiations and real-time decisions to optimize working capital across the business.