Procurement Integrity for Utilities
Proactively and continuously prevent, detect and respond to suboptimal business decisions, misconduct and inconsistent controls with improved procurement processes.
How SAS® Helps Ensure Procurement Integrity
SAS combines data management, analytics and intellectual property to help you minimize procurement losses. Quickly decide whether to stop invoices, payments or purchase orders. Detect even the most obscure instances of error or abuse. And reduce disruption and delays caused by low-risk items.
More effective monitoring
- Combine structured and unstructured data from virtually any source.
- Create a single, holistic view of a person or entity by automatically applying sophisticated data quality techniques.
- Quickly identify high-risk events that warrant further investigation – before money goes out the door – by continuously monitoring all activities.
Automated data analytics & reporting
- Streamline operations with a single platform that enables users to review all relevant data, perform advanced searches and apply temporal or geospatial methodologies.
- Go beyond individual invoice or payment views to analyze all related activities and entity relationships at a network dimension.
- Provide key decision makers with information via dashboards, portals, web analytics, mobile reporting, briefings, alerts and more.
Faster investigation processes
- Provide investigators with ready access to data and fraud signals in investigative workspaces.
- Facilitate collaboration, compliance and efficiency with an easy-to-use interface that provides interactive visualization and search components.
Domain expertise
- Take advantage of our extensive experience in text mining, machine learning and AI, which adds significant value beyond traditional rules-based approaches.
- Accelerate time to value with procurement models that provide objective, data-driven risk screening to identify high- and low-risk purchase orders, suppliers, invoices and payments.
- Empower procurement officers to remediate high-risk processes and secure financial positions quickly.
Why do utilities choose SAS® for procurement integrity?
SAS enables a multifaceted approach that combines internal controls, audits and an analytics platform to surface high-risk concerns before significant losses occur.
Continuously monitor activity to spot early-warning signs
Aggregate data from all relevant sources, both internal and external, using a common data model that facilitates continuous data analysis. Apply advanced analytics using predefined and customized scenarios to surface issues fast.
Quickly distinguish high-risk procurement activities from low-risk ones
Use a combination of analytical techniques, such as clustering, segmentation, pattern recognition and associations, to assess the overall risk posed by each payment, invoice, supplier or purchase order. This enables you to focus valuable resources on the threats that pose the highest risk.
Improve analyst & investigator productivity
Streamline operations by automating data management, alert generation and workflows, and provide analysts and investigators with an easy-to-use interface for exploring, visualizing and manipulating data pertinent to investigations.
Uncover instances of procurement fraud you would otherwise miss
Use the latest advanced analytics and AI capabilities to effortlessly sift through huge quantities of data, spotting anomalies and patterns quickly. Employ machine learning models.
SAS® Software Used
How does a national utility company with nearly 18,000 suppliers and 25,000 employees prevent significant losses due to procurement fraud and realize an immediate return on investment?
SAS helped the company:
- Identify $16.8 million in duplicate invoicing that had not yet been paid.
- Enable utility management to improve profitability by highlighting issues within the supply chain, including identifying:
- $500 million in payments without receipt of goods.
- Relationships between employees and suppliers.
- 25 ghost employees representing internal fraud.
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How does a national utility company with nearly 18,000 suppliers and 25,000 employees prevent significant losses due to procurement fraud and realize an immediate return on investment?
SAS helped the company:
- Identify $16.8 million in duplicate invoicing that had not yet been paid.
- Enable utility management to improve profitability by highlighting issues within the supply chain, including identifying:
- $500 million in payments without receipt of goods.
- Relationships between employees and suppliers.
- 25 ghost employees representing internal fraud.
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SAS helped the company:
- Identified a significant number of suppliers sharing the same bank account number with di•erent names, and found employees sharing bank accounts with suppliers.
- Uncovered excessive multiple invoicing, inflated payments and duplicate payments.
- Identified approximately US$700 million in duplicate invoices (same vendor, same amount, and greater than $5,000).
- Identified 600 employees with active interests in suppliers.
- Identified 25 ghost employees.
- Identified $500 million paid to suppliers without receiving goods.
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SAS helped the company:
- Gain immediate, valuable insights
- Identifying fraud, waste and abuse
Related Products & Solutions
- Data ConnectorsEffortlessly access your data with robust connectivity, cloud data integration and optimized processing.
- SAS® for Machine Learning & Deep LearningSupport end-to-end data mining and machine learning processes with comprehensive visual and programming interfaces for users of all skill levels.
- SAS® Intelligent DecisioningEasily create, manage and govern robust, analytically driven business rules to power decisioning at scale.
- SAS® Payment Integrity for ProcurementContinuously monitor procurement data and systems to reduce losses and optimize procurement processes.
- SAS® Visual AnalyticsDiscover and explore relationships in data, and share insights.
- SAS® Visual InvestigatorAddress a wide variety of intelligence analysis and investigation management needs with speed and precision.
- SAS® Visual Text AnalyticsScale the human act of reading, organising and extracting useful information from huge volumes of textual data.