Continuous Revenue Recovery for a Retail Industry Giant

This case study describes Discover Dollar’s engagement with a global retailer with 1800+ stores in North America. The customer has over $74 billion in auditable spending annually, distributed across 20,000 auditable vendors in Europe, North America, and Asia. Over 200+ retail stores and warehouses transact business with these suppliers. For a company of this size, with wide-ranging operations, a small percentage of transaction discrepancies inevitably lead to significant unrecovered losses. This can be classified as a loss under overpayment. In most instances, companies’ do not even get to chance to spot such losses.

THE OVERPAYMENT CHALLENGE:

Recovering overpayments and sending revenue to the bottom line is clearly a commendable effort. This is, essentially, an untapped resource, a straightforward way to increase working capital. However, it shouldn’t be managed in a disorganized manner that would potentially impact vendor relationships. One option is to develop a dedicated in-house team of experts to accurately identify and professionally ascertain and manage overpayment opportunities. This team would need to obtain and review statements from all vendors, documents, emails, chats, and contracts, several times a year to be effective. Creating and training team members for this function would, of course, create an initial increase in overhead costs. Moreover, this is an extremely laborious and manual task. In most cases, manual checks have proved to be very ineffective, and humans can also miss out on opportunities.

EVENTS: 

Given the challenges, many large corporations ignore the overpayment opportunity as statistically inconsequential. In this case, our Customer Success Leader saw the potential to solve the issue. Our leaders presented service offering with a plan that would make a steady increment to the bottom line with no upfront investment, no alterations to normal Source-to-Pay function, and processes no disruption of vendor relationships.