How Genpact Enabled Procure-to-Pay Transformation for a Global Energy Giant on AWS

By Sarvottam Darshan, Global Practice Lead, SaaS – Genpact
By Subrahmanyam Madduru, Global Partner Solutions Architect Lead – AWS

Genpact

Procurement and accounts payable teams are critical players in the financial management process. They oversee the accurate and punctual purchase and payment of all the resources organizations need to operate.

A typical procure-to-pay process, however, is filled with siloed solutions, piles of paperwork, manual workflows, process gaps, compliance issues, and time-consuming tasks.

While procure-to-pay automation can solve some of these challenges, they often create data silos—especially within large enterprises with multiple business units—which causes new problems and inefficiencies.

In today’s big data world, businesses need to break down data silos for a complete picture of spending and saving enterprise-wide. It’s time to reimagine the procure-to-pay process with a data-driven and fact-based approach for proven business results.

Genpact is an AWS Advanced Tier Services Partner holding AWS Financial Services and AWS DevOps Competencies. Genpact is also an AWS Well-Architected Program Partner with a focus on delivering digital-led innovation and digitally-enabled intelligent operations. Its experts have experience running thousands of procure-to-pay processes for global Fortune 500 companies.

In this post, we’ll explain how Genpact and Amazon Web Services (AWS) helped a Fortune 500 energy giant transform its procure-to-pay business, delivering savings of over $100 million in the first year alone.

Single Source of Truth for Enterprise Insights

A global company that provides technology, solutions, and services across the energy industry was looking to transform its procure-to-pay process. The goal was to drive better visibility into enterprise-wide spending and savings.

Unfortunately—due to years of mergers, acquisitions, and divestitures—the organization had a complex systems landscape with disparate systems. Procure-to-pay data was fragmented over 30 ERPs, all with different data models. This prevented the company from generating trusted insights for strategic decision making.

These operational complexities were preventing scalable transformation. So, the organization set out to create a single source of truth to produce the required business insights, while keeping disruption to its current systems landscape minimal.

The company turned to Genpact based on its digital, process, and industry expertise—combined with AWS’s leading cloud capabilities—to address the challenge.

Genpact developed a detailed data and analytics strategy by:

• Identifying procure-to-pay use cases and business goals to draw a clear roadmap to delivering tangible business impact.
• Bringing all data into an AWS data lake, without disrupting individual ERPs and data models, to prepare for the required insights.
• Building a cloud data lake for an enterprise-wide single source of truth, enabling massive data processing and scalability to meet future needs.
• Increasing speed to insights with easy-to-use, self-service procure-to-pay reporting and analytics.

Solution Overview

The aim was to deliver 20-30% cost savings across procure-to-pay process by transforming the traditional finance function into a data and analytics-driven finance office of the future.

Genpact took ownership of five key areas:

1. Ingesting massive data from a variety of sources.
2. Ensuring data security.
3. Handling low-quality data across 30+ disparate ERP systems.
4. Preventing disruption to existing business processes and systems.
5. Addressing the lack of strategy and driving transformation to realize target savings.

Genpact used its Mission Compass Framework (Figure 1), along with the reference architecture developed for data-driven finance offices, to lead the transformation. It worked with the organization to understand stakeholder needs, develop analytics use cases, and build the solution using AWS’s data and analytics services.

AWS addressed the data source integration, data processing, and secure data access challenges. Genpact and AWS also implemented data quality checks while harmonizing the disparate and fractured data models. Ultimately, this combination of implementation strategy and AWS cloud services was the key to success.

Genpact’s Approach

Genpact delivered the transformation in four steps:

Building the Strategy

Genpact delivered the enterprise-wide data and analytics strategy in just 12 weeks using its proprietary Mission Compass Framework. The framework looks at nine aspects of a comprehensive data and analytics strategy to develop a robust roadmap for achieving the required results.

Figure 1 – Genpact’s Mission Compass Framework.

Developing the Implementation Roadmap

Genpact’s strategy mapped out the future state vision as well as the roadmap and required data, technology architecture, and operating model to achieve this vision. The approach accelerated the entire project thanks to agile development sprints.

Figure 2 – Solution implementation roadmap.

Designing Solution Architecture

After the strategy and roadmap steps, Genpact designed the customer’s data and technology solution architecture. Genpact called upon the reference architecture (Figure 3) it has created based on its experience transforming finance offices for leading companies across various industries.

For a detailed view of data-driven finance office reference architecture, please refer to this AWS blog post: How Genpact is Innovating the Data-Driven Finance Office.

Figure 3 – Finance office of the future – reference architecture.

Building and Deploying the Solution on AWS

Based on the solution architecture developed, the Genpact delivery team implemented and deployed the solution on AWS revealing several benefits.

Solution Benefits

The solution has delivered benefits above and beyond client expectations, including:

• 25% productivity increase: Digitization and persona-based reporting allows employees to focus on the insights that matter most to their respective roles. Users now dedicate more time to action-oriented analytical work, instead of collecting and preparing data in a traditional way, which used to take up 60% of their time.
• $100M+ in associated value: Using Genpact’s data and analytics strategy, the solution delivers targeted use cases to improve procure-to-pay side contract negotiations, contract adherence, strategic sourcing, cash optimization, and tail end spend optimization.
• ~80% improvement in business agility: Through data democratization, including self-service, predictive, and what-if analytics, employees can develop reports at the click of a button to predict and respond to changing business scenarios. Average procure-to-pay response time has improved dramatically—from three months to just 10 days.
• Virtual and secure workforce over cloud: Thanks to AWS encryption, employees can access secure data anywhere based on their role. AWS’s change data capture (CDC) also logs changes to data for admin and security validation.

Conclusion

Procure-to-pay processes in any business function holds considerable data that can be analyzed to deliver value. Genpact encourages clients to walk this proven cloud data and analytics path and unlock business value from their procure to pay transformation.

If you would like to know more about how Genpact helps finance offices transform, while avoiding business disruption, visit genpact.com/finance-accounting.

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