Challenge
Breaking through the OCR ceiling in a complex global AP environment
The client ran a highly complex accounts payable (AP) environment in the global food and beverage industry, processing invoices across North America and Europe at significant scale. Recognizing that touchless processing was the key to reducing cost to serve and improving AP performance, the team set an ambitious goal to reduce manual intervention and increase touchless invoice processing.
But a structural problem stood in the way. The legacy optical character recognition (OCR) tool powering invoice capture delivered about 65%–67% accuracy, which meant frequent manual intervention at the very first step of the process. Extraction accuracy, at around 95%, still required human validation to catch errors. With touchless processing hovering around 48% and high exception volumes driven by missing goods receipt (GR) issues and price and quantity mismatches, the team knew that incremental fixes wouldn't cut it. It needed to solve the capture problem at its root.
The client turned to Genpact, leveraging an existing strategic relationship across finance operations, to replace the legacy system with something built to meet the demands of modern, high-volume AP.
Solution
Replacing the legacy bottleneck with agentic AI-powered capture
Genpact deployed Genpact AP Capture, an agentic AI-powered extraction module within the Genpact AP Suite, to replace the client's legacy OCR solution. Rather than patching an outdated system, this was a deliberate shift from traditional OCR to agentic AI-driven capture – designed to extract invoice fields such as invoice number, date, purchase order (PO) number, and line details with highly reliable accuracy across formats and geographies.
The rollout began with a phased approach, starting in North America, which allowed the team to drive performance before expanding. Genpact AP Capture's agentic AI enabled consistent extraction across diverse invoice formats and helped reduce the volume of invoices falling into manual queues. High-quality extracted data at the intake layer meant fewer errors cascading downstream, enabling reduced rework and exception volumes.
By automating digital capture at the point of intake, Genpact helped address key root causes of the client's AP challenges – not the symptoms – and built a cleaner, more reliable data foundation for everything that follows.
Impact
Near-perfect accuracy and a platform for autonomous AP
The results were realized quickly and sustained over time. Post go-live, extraction accuracy reached around 100% and held there, moving the needle from "good enough" to near perfect. That shift translated into an estimated productivity improvement of up to 50% in invoice processing, driven by a significant reduction in manual intervention and rework.
Qualitatively, the impact was equally significant. Fewer invoices fell to manual queues, validation effort dropped, and the AP team gained capacity to focus on higher-value tasks. Critically, the client now has the foundation to support higher levels of touchless processing (with potential to reach around 80%), improve on-time payment performance, and reduce helpdesk queries and cost to serve – outcomes that were previously difficult to achieve.
The success came down to a clear strategy. By identifying capture accuracy as the root problem and aligning Genpact AP Capture's capabilities directly to the client's North Star goals of touchless processing and reduced cost to serve, the engagement helped deliver measurable results early in the implementation. With the proposed rollout of AP Advance on the horizon, the organization is positioned to move toward more autonomous AP operations at scale.
