Coria's hyper automation boosts National Highways' actual cost confidence

Coria’s hyper automation tool Digital Cost Assurance improves National Highways’ actual cost confidence

Overview

National Highways needed to assure defined costs across large infrastructure programmes. Coria's Digital Cost Assurance (DCA) applied hyper automation to replicate NEC ECC4 commercial terms, creating objective, compliant, and consistent cost assurance at scale.

The challenge

• Manual validation of massive cost datasets slowed payment cycles and introduced inconsistency.
• Governance teams lacked a single source of truth to evidence entitlement to payment.
• Supplier behaviours varied, making it hard to enforce contract rules and produce auditable data.

The approach

• Digitised NEC ECC4 commercial rules to ensure every defined cost line was validated against contract terms.
• Automated anomaly detection and real time checks on rate compliance, quantities, and entitlements.
• Standardised data capture to produce clean, auditable records ready for governance and verification.
• Provided behavioural nudges by surfacing non compliant entries early, reducing downstream rework.

Results

• Higher actual cost confidence through consistent, contract aligned validation.
• Faster governance and verification backed by clean, auditable data.
• Reduced assessment time by removing manual rework on non compliant cost lines.
• Better supplier behaviours, driven by clear, automated enforcement of NEC ECC4 terms.

Why it matters

Digital Cost Assurance turns contract complexity into automated guardrails. National Highways can now evidence entitlement to payment with confidence, speed, and transparency across its infrastructure portfolio.