- Case study
An intelligent new trade promotions system for a CPG giant
How AI makes contracts and invoicing painless—and delivers insights, to boot
A major North American food company
Transform the manual trade promotion process to improve visibility and governance. The way forward was to have a centralized repository providing an audit trail of trade contracts, invoices, and trade promotions performance.
We deployed Contract Assistant—our product based on the AI platform, Genpact Cora—to automate the trade promotion process end to end.
A future that will boost governance and visibility while driving productivity improvements, growth in margins, and actionable insights from performance data.
Challenge
As a CPG giant, our client relies on retailers to execute much of its marketing strategy. In fact, it contracts with more than 150 large retailers to carry out over 300,000 transactions totaling about $2 billion annually. Retailers claim back a portion of the promotion costs they incur, and in the past the CPG company created manual contracts based on sales force input.
It validated each claim and invoice prior to approval, but it wasn't practical to audit more than 30% of invoice value—and that led to significant over-payments. What's more, there was no centralized information repository, so it was difficult to assess performance or to plan promotions based on analytics.
Although the company had already optimized its existing trade pay process, the system was ripe for AI automation. But no off-the-shelf solutions could do the job.
Solution
Genpact's Contract Assistant uses built-in artificial intelligence to extract, analyze, and reconcile contracts with a high degree of accuracy. It applies computational linguistics, pattern recognition, and machine learning to extract contract terms and validate them against invoices and other data.
The Genpact team used a structured assessment process to adapt this solution to our client's specific trade promotion requirements. Key steps included:
We used the Genpact Cora platform—and a holistic end-to-end approach—to automate each part of the process. Genpact Cora features a modular, interconnected mesh of technologies that tackles each business challenge and automates the following steps.
Our proprietary data extraction, pattern recognition, and language correction capabilities helped overcome input issues such as poor-quality scans and damaged documents. That minimized exceptions.
In the end, we successfully demonstrated how the system would not only improve efficiency and accuracy, but also how the new centralized data repository would support predictive analysis. Even better, machine learning means the system will improve continuously.
Impact
Following the successful proof-of-concept phase, our client is going forward with a view to revamping the entire trade promotions process. Our modular approach means the deployment will go live in short phases for rapid ROI. Expected business benefits include:
As well, our client will acquire a leading-edge data repository for assessing the performance of individual promotions. And that means it will allocate marketing resources more efficiently. It's a win-win all around.