50 Products Became 1,000+ Under Live Margin View And AP Went 90% Touchless
A private-equity-backed flexible packaging manufacturer could only see real-time margin on a handful of its products. Everything else, and every incoming invoice, ran through manual review.
The Setup
Before the engagement, real-time margin visibility existed for roughly 50 products a fraction of the manufacturer's actual SKU (stock-keeping unit, meaning a distinct sellable product or pack size) and division-level portfolio. Producing a fuller margin view took close to 20 days of manual spreadsheet work, by which point the pricing and mix decisions it should have informed had already been made on gut feel. Accounts payable told the same story from a different angle: thousands of invoices a month, most of them still touched by hand.
The Approach
Most AP automation projects stop at invoices. This one paired Payables Automation with SKU-level margin analysis on the same data backbone — so the same connected data that cut AP processing time also gave finance a live view of which products and divisions were actually profitable, instead of a monthly estimate built after the fact.