Accounts Payable Automation Rollout Project Manager Simulation — A.P. Moller-Maersk

The scenario

A.P. Moller-Maersk moves roughly a fifth of the world's seaborne container trade, and every one of those moves generates paper. Terminal handling charges, bunker adjustments, demurrage, inland haulage, port dues, lashing, customs brokerage. The Group's shared-service finance operation takes in more than four million supplier invoices a year across six Global Service Centres in Pune, Chennai, Mumbai, Manila, Chengdu and Copenhagen. Since 2019 that intake has been handled by a pipeline of OCR engines and rule-based software robots bolted onto SAP S/4HANA. The robots were a genuine improvement on manual keying. They also stopped improving in 2023: straight-through processing has been stuck at 38 percent for nine consecutive quarters, and the other 62 percent lands in a human exception queue that now occupies more than four hundred people in Pune alone. Robert Erni took over as Group CFO in the first quarter of this year and named a number on his first earnings call: straight-through processing above 80 percent within the financial year. The Finance Systems Modernization Program's answer is to retire the robot pipeline and replace it with autonomous AI agents that read an invoice, match it against the purchase order and goods receipt, code it to the correct cost centre and legal entity, and route it onward. Inside a defined confidence and value threshold, the agents were also designed to approve the invoice outright, with no human opening it at all. The Board released $4.2M for a pilot in Pune, and Ledgermind has been contracted at $2.6M fixed price to configure the agents and integrate them with SAP. The technology is not the hard part. Ledgermind demonstrated it in a six-week evaluation and the numbers were good. The hard part is that an invoice approval is a control, and Maersk's internal control framework has never had to describe a control that no person performed. Group Internal Audit has to be satisfied before an agent touches a live payment run. The accounts payable operation whose exception queue you are automating reports the very numbers you will be judged on. And the CFO has already said the figure out loud to the market. Your job is to make an autonomous control defensible, or to find out in front of everyone that it is not.

What you'll do as the project manager

• →Lift straight-through processing on the Pune pilot population from 38 percent to at least 80 percent by go-live
• →Reduce average invoice cycle time from 11.4 days to under 4 days across the piloted invoice types
• →Secure written control-design sign-off from Group Internal Audit before any agent action affects a live payment run
• →Cut the Pune exception queue's touch rate by 60 percent without a single unreviewed duplicate or overpayment reaching settlement
• →Deliver a documented control operating model and agent estate handover to run operations by Day 27

Project management skills you'll build

The challenges you'll navigate

• •The vendor's 94 percent accuracy figure was measured on purchase-order-backed invoices only; the non-PO population that drives most exception cost was never in the sample
• •No control owner has been defined for an approval performed by an agent, and Group Internal Audit has not been engaged at all
• •The four hundred people in the Pune exception queue have been asked to train the system that removes their work, with no answer yet on what happens to them
• •Model retraining is outside the fixed-price SOW, so any accuracy drift after go-live becomes a commercial negotiation rather than a support ticket
• •The straight-through-processing target has been stated publicly by the Group CFO, which removes the option of quietly rebaselining it

Technology & stakeholders

You'll manage 7 stakeholders, including Robert Erni (Group Chief Financial Officer), Mette Vestergaard (Programme Director, Finance Systems Modernization), Signe Kruse (Head of Internal Controls, Group Internal Audit), and more.

What you'll walk away with

A verified, shareable record of a completed enterprise project — plus the PMO deliverables you produced along the way (charter, project plan, SteerCo deck, closure document). It's real, demonstrable project management experience you can put on your resume and speak to in interviews.

Frequently asked questions

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