Mitie, a UK-headquartered facilities management (FM) and professional services leader employing almost 50,000 people with revenues of £2.2 billion in FY20, wanted to drive significant efficiency improvements and cost savings. In the midst of a multiyear transformation program that started before the COVID-19 pandemic, Mitie teamed with Wipro to manage their SAP cloud ERP migration to Microsoft Azure.

Mitie makes over £1 billion in procurement payments annually to third-party partners and suppliers, which translates into thousands of invoices and transactions. With the added complexity of using two different ERP systems to manage processes, it is critical to detect and prevent payment leakages that can occur, due to human error or fraud. Using traditional manual audit methods further increases the chances of error.

Mitie and Wipro’s AI solutions group partnered to create a solution that would reveal transactional anomalies within the Accounts Payable process, using a Machine Learning for Accounts Payable Auditor (AP Auditor), a  system based on the Anomaly Detection solution of Wipro Holmes, which is an AI-based platform hosted on AWS. The AP auditor was used to audit 10 years of third-party payments held in two ERP systems—a total of 11 million invoices.

Shifting from a random sampling-based approach to an AI-led 100% invoice audit, Mitie was able to detect anomalies like duplicate payments, credit memos marked as invoices, missed early payment discounts, late payment penalties, suspicious invoices and other vendor-related anomalies, thereby ensuring better revenue management. In sum, the revenue recovered and identified for future recovery was significantly more than the cost Mitie invested in the services and solutions.

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