The AP operation behind UPMC's 98% on-time payment performance

Customer Story

20% → 90% of supplier statements worked
98% on-time payment performance (vs. 81% healthcare peer benchmark)
$5.5M in early payment discounts and rebates captured
$2.4M recovered across 1,300 missing credits
$44M worth of missing invoices identified

Healthcare

Challenge: UPMC's Accounts Payable team was processing 1.8M invoices across hundreds of facilities, but supplier statement reconciliation had become unmanageable at scale. Manual reconciliation consumed so much time that by the time the work was complete, there was no capacity to identify root cause errors, or recover money. Credits aged on supplier statements, third-party recovery firms were expensive and the team was stuck firefighting the same problems month after month.

In a healthcare system, when finance processes slip, the impact isn’t contained to the back office. Supplier issues can ripple into day-to-day operations that need to run smoothly to support patient care. So, running a more reliable supply chain operation was imperative for UPMC.

Results: By automating supplier statement reconciliation with Xelix, UPMC moved from working just 20% of supplier statement volume to 90%. Thousands of supplier statements were reconciled in minutes and on-time payment performance hit 98%, helping the organisation run a more reliable supply chain operation at scale.

The team gained capacity for root cause analysis, captured $5.5M in early payment discounts and built supplier health dashboards that now feed directly into contract negotiations, allowing the team to shift from reactive firefighting to proactive supplier management.

Xelix Solutions: Statements, Helpdesk, Transactions

About UPMC

The University of Pittsburgh Medical Center (UPMC) is one of the largest integrated health systems in the Northeastern US, supporting 42+ hospitals and hundreds of facilities. With around 18,000 vendors and 1.8M invoices annually, their 20-person AP team needed a way to manage supplier statement reconciliation at scale.

We spoke with the Senior Director of Procure-to-Pay at UPMC, about how the team tackled financial leakage, transformed supplier statement reconciliation from a manual bottleneck into a strategic capability and repositioned AP as a value-generating function.

$26bn revenue
1.8M annual invoice volume
18,000 suppliers
20 AP team members

THE CHALLENGES

Supplier statement reconciliation at a scale manual processes couldn’t handle

As UPMC integrated hundreds of facilities into a centralised AP function, supplier statement volumes multiplied rapidly, outpacing what the team could manage manually.

The team built workarounds by prioritising supplier statements with ageing activity and running queries across both AP and ERP systems before manually reconciling each one. This process consumed so much time that by the time reconciliation was complete, there was no capacity for follow-up action.

"By the time staff completed reconciliations, there was little to no time left to work the items identified - no time for analysis or root cause."
- Kelly Coxon, Senior Director of Procure-to-Pay.

Credits were particularly difficult to track. Without visibility into which credit memos were outstanding, credits simply aged on supplier statements with money left on the table.
Fighting fires left no capacity for identifying and fixing root causes

With limited emphasis on supplier statement reconciliation, UPMC addressed recurring symptoms rather than root causes, allowing the same issues to resurface with each statement.

The team stayed in firefighting mode because root causes such as misconfigured bill-to addresses, missing EDI account setups and upstream procurement process gaps, stayed invisible.

"We don't want to direct teams to get really good at working problems, we want the problems to go away."
- Kelly Coxon, Senior Director of Procure-to-Pay.
Costly third-party recovery audits that kept UPMC stuck in a repeat cycle

Like many healthcare AP teams, UPMC had used third-party recovery audit firms to catch errors retrospectively, without getting answers into what was causing the errors.

"Recovery audits don’t provide root cause resolution, and they don’t help you build your team's capability to resolve issues internally. Audit fees are more than what you will pay to purchase a technology solution."
- Kelly Coxon, Senior Director of Procure-to-Pay.

Recovery audit firms focus on identifying missed credits, which can create continued dependency rather than building internal capability. They do not resolve the underlying invoice issues, leaving organisations positioned for repeat audits instead of sustainable improvement.

To learn more about the value Xelix can drive versus your recovery audit firm, check here.

THE SOLUTION

From firefighting to financial control

UPMC had strong process discipline, but needed better visibility. The team had specific criteria for what a technology partner needed to deliver.

“One of our top priorities was a business partner, not just a purchased service. You want a company that invests in their product and listens to the voice of the customer. You need quick ROI. Healthcare doesn't have unlimited dollars."
- Kelly Coxon, Senior Director of Procure-to-Pay.

From day one, thousands of supplier statements were reconciled in minutes, keeping action items up to date as Xelix Statements runs a daily analysis across your ERP and AP systems, automatically resolving outstanding action items so you only have to follow up where intervention is needed.
From manual exceptions to fixing the issue at source

The real transformation wasn't just speed, it was what the team could do with the reclaimed time.

Xelix surfaced that many suppliers' invoices were arriving through mixed channels, driving exceptions and statement discrepancies. With time freed up by automation, the team traced the root cause to inconsistent account setup across newly acquired facilities, and fixed the configuration at source, reducing exceptions and improving invoice-to-payment flow.

"Xelix levelled the playing field for the whole team. Before, working supplier statements required so much data manipulation that they just weren’t getting worked. Now you don’t need Excel or pivot table skills, Xelix produces the results."
- Natalie Haubach, Senior Manager of Procure-to-Pay.
From fragmented work to structured SLAs

Going live with Xelix Statements surfaced a significant backlog of historical issues.

UPMC established tiered SLAs for first, second and third follow-up actions for working statement items. With escalation protocols built in, the team had a clear principle that each action must differ from the last.

The process followed a first request, then escalation until a final decisive next step (e.g., deduct the credit from the next payment or close out the item), so the team has a clear idea when to push harder and when to take action.

UPMC also set goals for invoice and credit memo entry timelines, tightening the window between receipt and ERP entry to support early payment discounts and reduce late payment risk.

THE RESULTS

From 20% to 90% statement coverage

Before Xelix, measuring supplier statement coverage was a challenge itself because there was no tool tracking volume or completion rates. With Xelix, UPMC finally had the financial visibility to catch leakage before it compounds.

The proof came quickly. During the pilot phase alone, before UPMC had even gone fully live, the team recovered $380,000 in missing credits. It wasn't expected. For Kelly, it confirmed both the scale of the opportunity and the decision to move away from manual processes.

Since going live in October 2024, the numbers have continued to build. Xelix has surfaced 1,300 missing credits totalling $2.4 million that UPMC recovered without sharing a penny in audit recovery fees. Beyond credits, the tool identified over 12,000 missing invoices worth $44 million - liabilities that would previously have sat undiscovered until suppliers chased or credit holds were applied. Finding them proactively is what enables UPMC to pay on time, protect early pay discounts, and stay in control.
A stronger hand at the negotiating table

Better payment performance doesn't just improve operations, it changes UPMC's position with suppliers.

The team built individual health dashboards for their top suppliers, tracking performance across key metrics. That data now flows directly into contract negotiations.

"Our contracting team uses supplier performance data as leverage during negotiations. Strong payment performance gives us the ability to ask for better pricing, because we're demonstrably a better customer to deal with." - Kelly Coxon, Senior Director of Procure-to-Pay.

UPMC also tracks credit memo cycle times to ensure suppliers aren't holding cash that belongs to them, actively pursuing outstanding credits before they age.

The combined effect: Xelix Statements has helped UPMC capture $5.5 million in early payment discounts and rebate incentives, aka money that would've otherwise been left on the table.
A team operating at a higher level with the KPIs to prove it

Since implementing Xelix Statements, UPMC's on-time payment performance has improved from around 90% to 98% (against a Hackett benchmark of 81% for healthcare peers).

Touchless invoice processing now stands at 98%, compared to a healthcare average of 62%. First-time match rate is 93%, which Kelly identifies as her most important KPI.

The step-change in performance didn’t just show up in dashboards, it elevated UPMC’s operational strength across the supply chain as they were recently recognised with the 2025 GHX Award for Operational Excellence in Healthcare Supply Chain.

The transformation has also changed how AP is perceived internally.

"AP historically at UPMC had been viewed as just that necessary back-office area. We've really elevated them. AP has a strong voice at the table now — and finance is extremely impressed with the value the team is bringing." - Kelly Coxon, Senior Director of Procure-to-Pay.

From supplier statement reconciliation to an AP powerhouse

For UPMC, automated supplier statement reconciliation was just the start with Xelix. The team came to Xelix looking for a better way to manage supplier queries at scale, and the results Statements delivered quickly made the case for going further.

Since going live with Statements, UPMC has expanded to the full Xelix platform, adding Transactions for proactive duplicate and overpayment prevention, and Helpdesk to streamline supplier query management.

"Helpdesk has been transformative for building our supplier contacts. Suppliers reaching out proactively has created a golden pathway to the right people." - Natalie Haubach, Senior Manager of Procure-to-Pay.