20% recovered on a $30M supply chain
Retailers pull margin back in three ways. They take deductions off an invoice. They file chargebacks after the fact. They apply trade promotion allowances at a rate nobody agreed to. On a $30M supply chain, the finance team did not have the hours to check every line, so they checked the large ones and spot-checked the rest.
That is why errors passed through. Reading every line is not possible with the people they had.
We deployed an agent that reads the reading half of the role end to end. Every order is matched against the agreed terms, every invoice against the purchase order, and every deduction against the promotion or allowance that supposedly authorized it. Mismatches are pulled out and posted with the reason the match failed.
Twenty percent was recovered. The team now opens a queue of exceptions instead of a stack of documents, and they see only what the agent flags.
The agent finds and documents. People make the calls. Supplier relationships, escalation calls, and the judgment on which deductions are worth fighting all stayed with the team. A deduction clerk reads documents all day, and that is the part worth handing over. It is also the part nobody can keep up with by hand.
Results
20%
