Proven Profit in 90 Days: A Shared Services & Procurement Roadmap for the AI Era

Shared Services, Accounts Payable, and Procurement teams all share the same goal: protect margins, improve supplier performance, and deliver measurable value to the business. Yet, as David Brown, SVP of Audit Services at PRGX, explained during our recent SSON webinar, many organizations still struggle to realize the full value of their source-to-pay processes because their teams are operating from different data, systems, and perspectives. 

The challenge isn’t a lack of capability. It’s a lack of alignment. 

“Procurement is negotiating pricing, rebates, and terms. Shared Services is executing payments and managing day-to-day operations. Both teams are doing their jobs well, but they’re not always working from the same data.” 

The result is a familiar set of challenges: contract drift, pricing errors, missed allowances, disconnected supplier information, and limited visibility into whether negotiated value is actually being captured. 

From Reactive Recovery to Proactive Control 

One of the strongest themes from the discussion was the shift organizations are making from reactive recovery efforts to proactive prevention. 

Many companies still discover errors months or even years after they occur. By that point, opportunities may have aged out, supplier relationships may have changed, and recovering value becomes significantly more difficult. 

Instead, David outlined five areas where organizations can drive measurable results in as little as 90 days by combining purpose-built AI with proven audit and compliance expertise: 

1. Stop Errors Before They Happen

Traditional overpayment detection often relies on rules-based systems that generate large volumes of alerts and false positives. Teams spend significant time reviewing records that don’t matter while critical issues can still slip through. 

Today’s AI-powered approaches focus on confidence scoring and continuous learning. As transactions are reviewed and validated, models become smarter over time, helping organizations focus resources on the highest-risk exceptions. 

More importantly, preventing an error before payment delivers more value than recovering it after the fact. 

David highlighted the example of Waitrose and the John Lewis Partnership, which shifted from post-transaction rebate recovery to preventive controls. By identifying issues before settlement, the company achieved a 15% increase in recoveries and improved correction rates by 40-50% in the first year, while enabling suppliers and business stakeholders to resolve issues in real time. 

2. Unlock Hidden Value Through Supplier Statement Reconciliation

Many organizations review supplier statements, but the real challenge lies in the variety of formats and information sources involved. 

Critical opportunities often exist outside ERP systems, including: 

• Unapplied credits 

• Payment variances 

• Returns activity 

• Rebates 

• Unreconciled supplier balances 

AI can now digitize and normalize supplier statements across PDFs, spreadsheets, images, and other formats, making it possible to identify opportunities that would otherwise remain hidden. 

But technology alone isn’t enough. 

A key takeaway from the webinar was that while AI can surface opportunities at scale, human expertise remains essential for validation, root-cause analysis, and resolution. 

3. Turn Payment Terms into a Working Capital Lever

When attendees were asked about their biggest working capital challenges, fragmented data and a lack of benchmarking information were among the top responses. 

According to David, many organizations know their negotiated payment terms but have limited visibility into how they are actually paying suppliers. 

This creates opportunities to improve working capital by: 

• Consolidating payment data across systems 

• Benchmarking supplier terms against peers 

• Identifying inconsistent regional payment practices 

• Monitoring actual versus negotiated payment performance 

One featured case study involved an organization operating multiple ERP and SAP environments. After consolidating payment data and building supplier-specific negotiation playbooks, the company secured over $10 million in working capital improvements, achieving program payback from a single supplier negotiation within the first month. 

The key lesson: payment data shouldn’t be viewed as an operational output. It should be managed as a strategic lever. 

4. Move Beyond Contract Storage to Contract Compliance

Contract management emerged as one of the most significant opportunity areas discussed during the session. 

While many organizations have invested in Contract Lifecycle Management (CLM) systems, David emphasized that most CLMs are designed for storage, tracking, and renewals—not for compliance auditing. 

The real question isn’t whether a contract exists. 

The real question is: 

“Are we actually paying what we negotiated?” 

Using AI-powered clause extraction and contract intelligence, organizations can: 

• Analyze contracts at scale 

• Identify compliance risks 

• Evaluate complex pricing structures 

• Surface missing amendments 

• Score contracts based on risk and value opportunity 

According to data shared during the webinar, companies can lose up to 11% of contract value after signing due to gaps between negotiated terms and execution. 

David highlighted a logistics provider with a $76 million labor services contract where poor visibility into billing structures, excessive markups, and manual processes resulted in significant leakage. Through a detailed contract compliance review, PRGX identified: 

• $7.3 million in corrective recoveries 

• $5 million in recovered cash 

• $10 million in future cost avoidance 

5. Connect Structured and Unstructured Data

One of the most compelling discussions centered around an often-overlooked reality: 

The full agreement with a supplier rarely lives in a single system. 

Important information is frequently scattered across: 

• Contracts 

• Amendments 

• Pricing schedules 

• Supplier statements 

• Email chains 

• Rebate documentation 

• Side agreements and supporting files 

Historically, this information has been difficult to access and nearly impossible to analyze at scale. 

Today, AI can extract and connect these disparate sources, providing organizations with a more complete view of their supplier relationships and helping uncover opportunities that structured data alone cannot reveal. 

A Real-World Example of End-to-End Value 

To close the session, David shared the example of a global manufacturer that initially engaged PRGX for a traditional AP recovery audit. 

The audit uncovered an unusually high volume of pricing and rebate discrepancies. By expanding the engagement into contract compliance and leveraging both transactional and contract data, the company transformed a one-time recovery effort into a broader value management program. 

The results included: 

• $16 million recovered from the most recent audit 

• $98 million in cumulative savings 

• Continuous monitoring controls that now prevent many errors from occurring in the first place 

Most importantly, the organization addressed the root causes by bringing Procurement, Pricing, and AP teams together around a shared data strategy. 

The future of Source-to-Pay performance isn’t about adding more technology for its own sake.

It’s about using AI to connect fragmented data, improve visibility, and help Shared Services and Procurement teams work from the same source of truth. 

Organizations that successfully align these functions can move beyond chasing errors after the fact and start preventing value leakage before it occurs. 

The message from this webinar was clear: AI is not replacing expertise. It is amplifying it. And when combined with the right controls, data, and domain knowledge, it can help organizations deliver measurable profit improvement in as little as 90 days.