TCS deployed a custom AI solution to automate the GRIR reporting process for a global manufacturer, slashing analysis time by 87.5%, mitigating financial risk, and enhancing cash flow forecasting accuracy.
In this article
The Challenge
The manual preparation of GRIR reports is highly time-consuming and fails to support precise, data-driven business decisions.
Our client, a leading global manufacturing company headquartered in Europe, partnered with TCS to enhance the efficiency and accuracy of its finance operations. As part of TCS’s finance and accounting (F&A) service scope, the team is responsible for preparing Goods Received & Invoice Received (GRIR) reports that reconcile supply chain and finance data across the enterprise.
The GRIR report, prepared twice a month for 22 legal entities, contains over 3,000-line items per entity that must be analyzed and annotated with the next action steps. However, the manual preparation of these reports was time-intensive and inconsistent. The client expressed concern that the manual process yielded generic comments, which failed to support the business units in taking precise, corrective actions.
The core challenge was transforming a high-volume, repetitive accounting task into a source of strategic insight. The existing manual process was not only time-consuming but also ineffective, leading to:
- Lack of Actionable Guidance: Generic comments did not enable business units to resolve discrepancies quickly.
- Operational Inefficiency: Significant manual effort was required to analyze thousands of items every month.
- Compliance and Financial Risk: The process was prone to human error, potentially leading to missed follow-ups and financial inaccuracies.
The TCS Solution
Infusing AI with Deep Domain Expertise
TCS developed an AI-powered automation solution to transform the GRIR analysis and reporting process.
Using advanced AI modeling (Qwen3-235B / DeepSeek), the tool was trained with TCS domain knowledge — including six GRIR business scenarios and 36 decision rules for each scenario — to replicate expert judgment at scale. The AI system performs end-to-end automation:
- Automated Variance Analysis: Identifies mismatches between goods received and invoices received.
- Intelligent Recommendations: Suggests next-step actions and specifies which business stakeholder to contact, along with recommended follow-up frequency.
- Smart Reporting: Summarizes all analytical insights and automatically populates them into the GRIR report for accountant review.
- Continuous Learning: Applies big data analysis to refine recommendations and guide process improvements over time.
The solution was first validated through an internal proof of concept using sample data, followed by deployment in the client’s cloud environment to ensure scalability, compliance, and data security.
The Result
Tangible Business Impact and Strategic Roadmap
The AI-driven transformation has yielded dramatic, quantifiable results, turning a compliance task into a value-driving operation.
Quantitative Key Benefits:
- Dramatic Efficiency Gain: Average Handling Time (AHT) per entity reduced from 120 minutes to just 15 minutes—an 87.5% improvement.
- Zero-Error Performance: GRIR issue tickets caused by incorrect actions have been reduced from 4% annually to 0%.
- Major Financial Risk Mitigation: Reduced the risk of financial misstatement by $8.66 million (covering 30-45 days of exposure).
Strategic Value Add:
- Cash Flow & Treasury: Enabled precise cash flow forecasting and optimized payment plans.
- Accounting Integrity: Minimized AP accruals and reduced duplicate payment risk.
- Tax Compliance: Ensured on-time Input-VAT deduction, avoiding potential tax bureau inspections.
- Supply Chain Optimization: Increased inventory and cost evaluation accuracy.
This automation has enabled accountants to focus on high-value tasks, while providing business units with reliable insights to take timely, data-backed decisions.
Looking Ahead
Towards End-to-End Automation
This initiative demonstrates how TCS combines AI, domain expertise, and automation to reimagine finance processes — improving accuracy, agility, and collaboration between finance and operations, while unlocking new business value across the enterprise.
Building on the successful implementation, TCS and the client are taking the solution further to achieve full process integration and intelligence:
- ERP Integration: Embedding the AI tool directly into the core enterprise resource planning system.
- Automated Stakeholder Engagement: Implementing auto-triggered emails to stakeholders and feeding their responses directly into the report.
- Dynamic Dashboarding: Developing a live, dynamically refreshing dashboard for real-time visibility into GRIR health and process improvement.
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