June 23, 2026

When Controls Still Aren’t Enough

This month, we zoom in on three topics that are getting the attention of finance and procurement leaders—and candidly, PRGX leaders as well. Let’s break them down in S2P Edge.

AP & Finance: Prevention is the New Audit, but Don’t Stop There 

Let’s start with a quick story from an event earlier this month in Austin. A finance leader told us, “Our controls are outstanding. There’s no way you’ll find anything.” We kindly explained… “No doubt you’re doing all the right things. Standard, ongoing controls are crucial. We work with over 300 global companies with impressive, high-performance teams that have built outstanding, intelligent automation. But there’s a reason we’ve been around for 55 years and continue to thrive. Our experts, powered by our proprietary AI, consistently deliver incremental value.”

This goes to the very heart of what leaders need to consider right now.

We’re at a point in time where finance operations are focusing on both recovery and prevention: recover what’s already lost, and build the guardrails so it stops leaking out.

But tools delivering efficiency can still miss too many exceptions. Three-way match, automated invoice processing, ERP controls — they catch what they’re configured to catch. But vendor relationships are complicated. So are system migrations.

What actually works is three things running together.

• Recovery — to find what’s already gone and build the root cause picture of where your processes are actually failing, not just where you assumed they might.
• Prevention — built on that real recovery data, so you’re monitoring for the errors that are genuinely costing you money.
• Exception management expertise — the pattern recognition and domain knowledge to catch what the tools keep walking past. Because they will keep walking past it until someone who knows what to look for goes looking.

PRGX is built around all three. AP Profit Recovery surfaces the root cause intelligence that sharpens Overpayment Prevention. And the domain expertise and exception intelligence sit behind both — covering the ground that automated tools don’t reach. It’s a loop. Exception handling is what closes it.

Procurement: AI Won’t Save You if Your Data is a Mess

For procurement teams, there’s a data problem that lives mostly in contracts. Obligations buried in PDFs nobody’s reviewed since signing. Terms that were negotiated but never verified. Supplier performance commitments with no systematic tracking behind them. You can’t build an intelligent procurement function on top of that—and an orchestration layer won’t fix it.

The other thing worth paying attention to: procurement leaders consistently say execution speed  (not strategy!)  is what’s holding them back. The ideas aren’t the problem. Moving fast enough to act on them is.

Both of those problems — data quality and execution speed — are contract problems at their core. Let’s fix them.

The PRGX Contract Management suite is not a CLM. We operate on top of existing systems, working across your ERP, S2P, and contract platforms to validate what’s actually happening versus what was agreed. This gives procurement teams a picture of what’s in their agreements and where that next contract could lead to meaningful value creation: the obligations, the risks, the opportunities that are sitting dormant in the contract portfolio right now. Yes, you can close the execution gap. Rather than finding out at the end of a quarter that a supplier hasn’t honored negotiated terms, you can have continuous visibility into whether what was agreed is what’s actually happening.

Starting an AI initiative without first getting a clear picture of your contract data is building on sand. That’s as true for procurement as anywhere else in the S2P function — and it’s a good place to start the conversation.

Retail & Manufacturing: The Pressure Is Structural

Retail and manufacturing procurement leaders aren’t dealing with a single disruption they can wait out. Margin compression, supply chain instability, tariff exposure — the combination has created something more like a permanent operating condition than a rough patch. Reactive responses aren’t cutting it anymore.

A few things are resonating with leaders in these sectors right now:

Supplier collaboration under margin pressure. The instinct when margins tighten is to push costs down the chain. The organizations holding margin better are doing something different — pulling key suppliers closer. Better data sharing, earlier demand visibility, contract terms built around shared outcomes rather than adversarial ones. Supplier Connect is designed for exactly this environment.

• Dispute resolution & cleaner communication
• Overpayment prevention
• Faster resolution = faster financial outcome

Focus on stronger relationships at the moment when those relationships are under the most strain.

Working capital and leakage. Financing costs have kept the focus on payment terms and dynamic discounting — and that focus is warranted. But working capital optimization falls apart if the underlying payment data is dirty or contracts aren’t being executed as written. Retail Profit Recovery and Funding Insight give retail and manufacturing organizations the visibility to find where margin is leaking across complex supplier and payment environments — and the mechanism to get it back.

Together, Retail Profit Recovery, Funding Insight & Supplier Connect give you comprehensive visibility and control across supplier interactions, payments and contract execution…exactly where margin leakage often occurs.

Supply chain resiliency as a procurement mandate. Getting analysis right depends on having accurate, complete spend and contract data. Sound familiar? It’s the same data readiness issue we just saw in procurement..just showing up differently.

The organizations widening the gap right now are the ones treating S2P data as a strategic input into the business, not a record-keeping function. The ones falling behind are still working with fragmented visibility across sourcing, contracts, and payments. That gap shows up in margin. It’s that direct.

That’s the June edition of S2P Edge. As always — if something here sparks a conversation you want to have, reach out: Speak with a PRGX expert