Challenge
Navigating inefficiencies across accounts payable and order to cash
When invoices don't land in the right mailbox, everything downstream feels the impact. For a leading metals manufacturer, this was just the start. Teams were pulling data by hand, chasing approvals manually, and watching errors stack up. This meant slower postings, tied-up working capital, and low confidence in the process.
Buyer communication was scattered across inboxes with no single thread to follow. And with invoices arriving in multiple languages, accurate interpretation added yet another layer of complexity to an already stretched operation.
The result? The finance function ran hard just to keep up.
Beyond accounts payable, the company faced multiple hurdles in its order-to-cash (O2C) and collections processes:
- Quarterly factoring payments in SAP faced system limitations on batch entries
- The cash application team spent too much time manually mapping customer coil numbers to assignment numbers and cross-referencing high-value customer remittances to multiple reports
- The collections team relied heavily on manual email tracking and correspondence allocation
All of this led to error-prone workflows, delays, and limited visibility. It was time for the company to fast-track its digital transformation plans.
Solution
Integrate advanced technologies seamlessly
We partnered with the client to modernize its AP and O2C operations. After conducting thorough blueprinting and due diligence on the AP scope, we began building the strong digital foundation required to automate workflows. This included:
- Genpact AP Capture: Powered by Microsoft Azure, Genpact AP Capture uses agentic AI to accurately extract data from invoices, automatically classifying and enriching the information with multilingual support and dynamic prioritization
- Smart anomaly detection: The anomaly detection module uses machine learning to combat the risk of duplicate payments and identify anomalies in transaction patterns
- Unified dashboards with Power BI: Unified Power BI and Power Automate dashboards deliver live, integrated reporting by harnessing agentic systems, data lake, and more. Automated trend analysis and performance comparisons provide faster insights, and standardized dashboards drive consistency and efficiency
To address the specific bottlenecks in O2C and collections, we deployed targeted quick process order-to-cash automation solutions to:
- Automate the quarterly factoring payment process to bypass SAP batch entry limitations, eliminating manual entry for over 600 invoices
- Automatically map coil numbers, merge similar assignments, calculate totals, and prepare SAP-ready posting data with precise invoice-level details, reducing turnaround time by up to 75%
- Automate the preparation of remittances for high-value customers, replacing the need to manually cross-reference three separate reports
- Implement a Microsoft Power Platform-based digital workflow for more than 15 users to seamlessly track emails, manage customer correspondence, and allocate work
Impact
Faster invoices, bigger savings, more accuracy
The collaboration led to significant improvements across the finance function.
Our overarching AP solutions:
- Achieved 98% invoice processing accuracy
- Significantly reduced duplicate payments
- Delivered millions of dollars in savings while providing real-time translation and reporting capabilities for enhanced decision-making
- Automated real-time reporting for more than 13 reports for AP, including visibility on AP KPIs and service-level agreements (SLAs) using Power BI, enhancing efficiency and effectiveness
The newly deployed automation tools for O2C and collections generated immediate, measurable efficiency gains:
- Reduced daily turnaround time from 2–3 hours to just 20–30 minutes, freeing up over 600 hours each year
- Cut daily cash application turnaround time (TAT) from 1–2 hours to 20–25 minutes, saving up to 240 hours every year
- Decreased quarterly processing time from 8–10 hours to only 15–20 minutes, saving up to 48 hours each year
Strong partnership and governance were key to this success. By nearly eliminating manual constraints and elevating accuracy, the project increased the finance team's agility and supported the company's wider digital transformation program.
