Data and AI
Budget Forecasting Solution Saves ~$1.4Mn monthly for a Leading US Electrical Contractor & Systems Partner
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Client overview
As one of the leading electrical and tech systems contractors in the USA, our client operates across multiple strategic regional hubs and provides end-to-end electrical contracting and systems services. Their expertise has powered thousands of successful electrical contracting projects nationwide, helping their clients achieve reliable, efficient and future ready outcomes.
With more than a century of industry experience and a coast-to-coast presence, our client partners with companies of every size and complexity. By combining innovation, performance, and reliability, they empower their clients to achieve success in even the most demanding environments.
Business challenges
Managing thousands of projects nationwide, combined with complexity of recent high-volume strategic mergers and acquisitions, created significant challenges in the client’s budgeting and vendor management processes. Coordinating operations across multiple entities manually strained visibility, consistency, and control, making it difficult to ensure accurate project cost and streamlined vendor relationships
The existing manual project budgeting and forecasting processes were falling short in providing enterprise-wide visibility and governance. The complexity introduced by newly merged business units further fragmented and decentralized project financing, creating an urgent need for modernization.
The client's primary goal was to set up a centralized project forecasting and budgeting system that seamlessly supports finance teams across the parent company and the newly integrated entities. The system needed to unify project budgeting and vendor management while ensuring accuracy and efficiency.
However, automating Project Financial Workbook (PFW) depended heavily on the integrity of the Procure-to-Pay (P2P) cycle. This made end-to-end vendor payment automation a critical requirement. Compounding the challenge of client’s existing data architecture and reporting capabilities led to mismatches in invoice data extraction, resulting in significant financial leakage.
To address these challenges, the client sought to partner with Aspire Systems to modernize its legacy project budgeting/forecasting system. Together we implemented a strategic solution design to unify finance operations across the parent company and newly integrated entities.
Solution approach
Our experts began by conducting a comprehensive diagnostic of the client’s existing project financing processes across all entities. The evaluation discovered critical visibility gaps, and teams noted the pain points that were limiting scalability particularly in the newly integrated entities.
The assessment focused on three priority areas:
- Digitized Project Financial Workbook - transitioning from manual processes to digital model for greater accuracy and transparency.
- Advanced data reporting – strengthening reporting capabilities to provide reliable enterprise-wide insights and eliminate mismatches.
- Automated vendor payment processing – streamline the procure-to-pay process to ensure integrity, reduce leakages, and improve governance.
By mapping the flow of data from field-level project sites to central financial systems, we designed a modular transformation strategy to meet the client’s demands and expectations without disrupting business-as-usual (BAU) activities.
We transitioned the client’s fragmented, site-specific, spreadsheet-driven workflows to automated and scalable Project Financial Workbooks (PFWs). By integrating a unified calculation engine with 300+ logical formulas, we established a single source of truth that bridged the gap between field-level labor projections and corporate budget management, effectively eliminating visibility gaps.
To support the new digital workflows, we overhauled the client’s underlying data infrastructure. By decommissioning legacy mirroring systems and migrating to a Databricks-driven architecture, we unlocked real-time reporting across 63+ complex Power BI dashboards. This shift from siloed metrics to data-agnostic liquidity provided the client with the Single Source of Truth required for agile, data-driven decision-making.
We replaced a high-volume, manual vendor payment process with an AI-powered extraction pipeline. Moving beyond rigid template-matching, we deployed a customized ML model to parse diverse invoice formats from 600+ vendors. This Intelligent Process Automation (IPA) framework, orchestrated via Microsoft Power Platform, increased extraction accuracy to 96%, directly mitigating the risk of mismatched billing and operational leakage.
The implemented modular PFWs, the optimized data architecture for advanced data reporting capabilities for accurate invoicing, and the end-to-end automated vendor payment processing enabled the client to seamlessly integrate its finance operations into the existing hubs and newly integrated entities. This modular strategy also enabled the client’s project budgeting and forecasting future-ready so that the client can effortlessly integrate the PFWs into any number of strategic hubs in future.
Value adds
- 70% faster month-end consolidation through automated microservices-driven workflows
- 40% reduction in approval cycle time enabled by dynamic workflow routing and queue-based processing.
- 80% reduction in manual entry, freeing finance teams for high-value analysis and strategic decision making
- Improved invoice data extraction accuracy from 80% to ~96%
Business impact
Modernization initiative delivered measurable enterprise-wide savings and efficiency gains.
- 10+ hours saved per project, resulting in an accumulated savings of approximately $1.4Mn per month across the enterprise
- 5 FTE saved per month by automating manual efforts previously handled by a 7-member team, allowing resources to be deployed in higher-value activities.
