Challenge
Financial leakage hidden in complexity
Retailers operate in one of the most complex commercial environments: thousands of suppliers, constantly changing pricing and promotions, seasonal variations, joint campaigns, and a high volume of manual, unstructured email interactions. Thus, contract compliance becomes even more difficult.
For this global retailer managing thousands of SKUs across categories like apparel, pharmacy, food and beverages, and electronics, that complexity translated into financial leakage. Missed supplier promotions, missed allowances, pricing discrepancies, and non-collected fundings were difficult to detect using traditional post-payment audit approaches and existing controls. As a result, recovery rates were low, visibility into root causes was limited, and valuable margin was lost every year.
The retailer needed a fundamentally different approach: one that could operate at scale, integrate structured and unstructured data, and move from reactive recovery to proactive prevention.
Solution
The future of audits: Operate smarter, recover faster, mitigate revenue leakage at source
Genpact implemented its Post-Payment Audit solution, hosted on Microsoft Azure and powered by Databricks, to deliver end-to-end audit and enable recovery at scale, while continuously generating insights to prevent future revenue leakage.
At its core, the solution analyzes vast volumes of supplier transaction data across purchasing, pricing, billing, sales, and inventory to detect anomalies, such as missed promotions, that standard reviews often miss. The audit engine has been trained on over 150 leakage models to identify potential leakages and is augmented by generative AI to extend post-payment audits beyond structured data.
Generative AI analyzes large volumes of unstructured buyer-supplier emails, deal notes, and contracts using natural language processing and semantic search. The solution identifies and extracts commercial commitments embedded in email conversations, converting them into structured, auditable records linked to suppliers, categories, and validity periods. This helped detect missed credits, short collections, and pricing deviations that traditional accounts payable or contract audits can miss.
The solution also provides near-real-time dashboards and insights, giving stakeholders visibility into recovery progress, supplier performance, and root causes of financial leakage. These insights help in upstream process improvements and financial leakage prevention at the source – a shift from a periodic exercise to a continuous, insight-driven capability. We helped the retailer build a resilient and financially sustainable supply chain.
Built on scalable Microsoft technologies like Azure Data Factory, Azure Databricks, Azure AI, and Microsoft Power BI, among others, the platform supports secure ingestion, processing, and visualization of large datasets. It enables faster recovery cycles and consistent performance across business units.
Impact
From recovery to resilience: Driving sustainable P&L improvement
By analyzing the company's data (including sales, purchases, and inventory) and margins, we helped unlock over $100 million in P&L savings and generated root-cause insights to avoid future losses. In the first year, the retailer increased its P&L savings by more than 100% compared to the previous year. Audit accuracy improved significantly, reducing recovery costs and increasing confidence in outcomes.
Beyond recovery, the retailer gained enterprise-wide visibility into revenue leakages, enabling better governance, faster decision-making, and clearer accountability across suppliers and categories. Most importantly, the solution's insights helped strengthen controls, address recurring compliance issues, and mitigate future revenue leakage. This transformed post-payment audits into a powerful driver of financial performance.