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Automated Statement Reconciliation — Coca-Cola Consolidated

Automated Statement Reconciliation — Coca-Cola Consolidated

Coca-Cola Consolidated: The Nations Largest Coca-Cola Bottler

September 25, 2025

Snapshot

  • Client: Coca‑Cola Consolidated
  • Project: Automated Statement Reconciliation
  • Student team: Andrew White, Ata Guvendi, Ethan Guo, Max Nelson
  • Faculty advisor: Moses Chan

The challenge:

Vendor statement reconciliation is a manual and time-consuming process. Formats varied widely, creating bottlenecks in extracting the right fields, standardizing layouts, and comparing statements to the ERP records. The result: avoidable backlog and inconsistent visibility into discrepancies.

Coca-Cola Consolidated receives approximately 100 vendor statements per month, with significant seasonality.  It takes approximately 7,000 person-hours to reconcile the vendors.  Even with this amount of time, large backlogs can still develop due to the number of statements (which can exceed the hours available), the variability of manual processing effort, and seasonal fluctuations.

The solution:

The team designed a modular, multi‑tier prototype that:

  • Ingests statements in varied formats (e.g., PDF/spreadsheet/exports).
  • Extracts relevant fields using document‑parsing and modern NLP/document‑AI techniques.
  • Normalizes the data into a common schema.
  • Reconciles against ERP data to surface matches, deltas, and exceptions.
  • Supports human-in-the-loop review with an audit trail and exportable documentation for inquiries.

The architecture is built to onboard additional vendors with minimal rework while preserving controls and traceability.

Expected impact

  • Cycle‑time reduction and relief of reconciliation backlog.
  • Consistency and auditability through a repeatable, documented workflow.
  • Scalability across additional vendors and formats as the library grows.
  • Material cost avoidance automation can reduce much of the ~7,000 hours and allow the team to focus on exceptions and more value-added work.

Voices from the client

“Thanks to Andrew, Ata, Ethan, and Max for collaborating with our BI team on the Accounts Payable automation effort. It was a pleasure working with them, and we were impressed with the solution. The prototype is solid and thoughtful—it addresses the problem effectively and shows a clear grasp of both technical and business needs. The team was engaged, professional, and responsive throughout. Overall, the project went well.”
— Matt Chrostowski, BI Developer II, Coca‑Cola Consolidated

 

“This was my first year working with the Northwestern students and I was blown away by their technical acumen and professionalism. They worked closely with our BI team, who was impressed by how quickly the students understood our business challenge and the creative solutions they developed. Their use of AI and automation to create a low-touch solution provided real business value, and we are currently working to further test and scale their solution.”

— Victoria Osborne Cockerham, Director, IT Strategy & Initiatives, Coca‑Cola Consolidated

 

“The team quickly internalized our reconciliation pain points across many vendor formats and applied modern document AI and matching techniques to solve them. The result is a pragmatic path to automation that fits our environment without major ERP changes.”
— Venkat Koppuravuri, Information Technology, Coca‑Cola Consolidated.

Other Coca-Cola Consolidated team members include Donte Blakely, Victoria Cockerham, and Brett Frankenberg.

What’s next

  • Validate the prototype on an expanded vendor set and finalize field mappings.
  • Productionize pipelines with operational monitoring and role-based access.
  • Phased rollout with change‑management support and training materials.

About Coca-Cola Consolidated

Read about Coca-Cola Consolidated on their website.