Overview
Brown & Brown markets and sells insurance products and services primarily in the United States, as well as in England, Bermuda, and the Cayman Islands.
Brown & Brown’s retail segment provides property insurance relating to physical damage to property and resultant interruption of business and offers risk management and loss control surveys and analysis, consultation, and claims processing services.
The company’s national programs segment offers professional liability and related package insurance products for professional groups. Brown & Brown’s services segment offers third-party claims administration and medical utilization management services.
An early adopter of Workday Financial Management, Brown & Brown’s growth strategy focused on acquisitions. Consequently, each acquisition introduced new systems, processes, and supplier relationships into the existing payables framework, adding layers of complexity to an already beleaguered AP process.
Before Auditoria
Brown & Brown needed to integrate their sophisticated Workday finance system into a manual and fragmented AP process. The outdated AP processes hampered the ability to collect and analyze AP data efficiently, and each new acquisition required significant effort to standardize operations under the shared services group.
With more than 20K active suppliers and 120K annual invoices, the manual processing of such high invoice volumes across five divisions and hundreds of locations was inherently inefficient and prone to bottlenecks.
Brown & Brown wanted an innovative approach that incorporated automation into the AP process. The transition to an automated approach would require technical integration and a cultural shift towards centralized processing and standardization across divisions and locations.
Andy Watts, Chief Financial Officer and Executive VP
After Auditoria
Brown & Brown identified Auditoria.AI’s AP Helpdesk, with certified integration into Workday, as the solution to help centralize AP operations and consolidate processes to streamline AP workflows.
AP Helpdesk aggregated data from incoming emails in shared accounting inboxes, offering a consolidated data and task view for the Brown & Brown team. The AP Helpdesk Agents, AI-infused intelligent, finance-trained applications, handled more than 90% of the incoming requests, executing authorized tasks and responding to questions
Auditoria’s AP Helpdesk Agents processed AP mailbox emails via 24/7 inbox monitoring and autonomous contact verification. Intent detection was powered by Large Language Models and finance-specific Small Language Models, with AI-assisted request fulfillment and task resolution.
AP Helpdesk Agents also handled invoice submission intake, flagged duplicate invoices, and transferred new invoice files directly to Workday Financial Management.
AP Helpdesk Collaborative Mode empowered users to review, modify, and approve Agent processing outcomes, which included detected intents and Agent-generated replies. Insights on mailbox activity, detected intents, task handling, and more were available via the AP Helpdesk console.
Andy Watts, Chief Financial Officer and Executive VP
Realizing Impactful Results
Brown & Brown’s ongoing multi-year effort to centralize AP was a strategic move toward improving efficiency and control. It required change management, process reengineering, and system integration. Brown & Brown’s automation leaders convinced divisions and locations to adopt a unified approach, addressing concerns related to autonomy, job security, and learning new systems and processes.
Brown & Brown saw value quickly through Auditoria’s API-certified Workday connections and enterprise integrations, with minimal IT dependence, thanks to pre-built programming and best-in-class protocols. This gave their finance teams the ability to consolidate AP operations and improve speed, accuracy, and efficiency for their finance department operations.
Summary email extraction insights, such as intent detection, replies, and tasks, were displayed and exportable for Brown & Brown’s team, with Agent performance reporting to highlight the value and insights gained.
