How ABInBev is leveraging Startups through Corporate Innovation to solve real problems

This is the story of how Corporate Innovations teams can leverage startups to drive real and concrete results to the organization. It's a common myth to think the ROI from an innovation project will come only after 10 or 15 years. Here's a success story where Innovation teams could leverage the right startup partner to get concrete ROI in matter of weeks. But how? Let’s take a look!

❌ What was going wrong?

ABInBev, the world’s largest brewer, procures billions of dollars worth of goods and services from thousands of vendors across the globe. Now, managing the financial aspect of a global supply chain system is always tricky and frankly quite complex. Even when you are 99% times accurate, potentially, one would expect that there would be leakages in the Procure-to-Pay process which might have financial implications,

💡 Enter Discover Dollar (aka DD)

Realizing there was an opportunity in their Procure-to-Pay process, the Innovation Brewery (Innovation Arm of AB-Inbev) onboarded Discover Dollar to primarily help identify the leakages using their proprietary algorithms. Discover Dollar ran the pilot on their procurement data like purchases, payables, and invoices data.

✔️ The impact

Within a few weeks, Discover Dollar was able to recover millions of dollars lost in leakages using their proprietary algorithms powered by machine learning. With this exercise, ABInBev was able to retrieve the money which would have been otherwise LOST FOREVER directly increasing Profits and Cash Flows.

This is a classic story where innovation can be brewed with the right ingredients - identify the right use case, align the business stakeholders and most importantly, bring the right startup partner. Here are some pictures from one such successful BudStart program

My Personal Note: ABInBev was one of the quickest companies to move from idea to results in a matter of weeks. Unlike many corporates, they move at lightning speed to get things done. All in all, we are glad that ABInBev and Innovation Brewery put their faith in us and we were able to deliver what we promised. 💯

To reach out to ABInBev Innovation Brewery or Discover Dollar, please write on help@discoverdollar.com