Case in video
Leroy Merlin
How Leroy Merlin elevated compliance and supplier governance with Linkana.
Case description
Leroy Merlin, one of the largest retailers in Brazil, faced a critical challenge: how to ensure governance, compliance, and risk management with a base of over 30 thousand suppliers?
The answer came through the Supplier Honorability Project, implemented in partnership with Linkana, the leading platform for onboarding, due diligence, and supplier monitoring.
According to Michelle López, Compliance Officer at Leroy Merlin and Obramax:
“At Leroy Merlin, we chose Linkana because we needed a compliance solution that went further: truly knowing our suppliers, managing risks, ensuring governance, and scaling safely.”
The Challenge of Governance at Scale
With a large-scale operation and national presence, Leroy Merlin Brazil faced a critical challenge: how to ensure governance, compliance, and risk management with a base of over 30 thousand suppliers?
The complexity was even greater given the diversity of categories (resale, non-resale, carriers, marketplace) and the obligation to follow international regulations, such as the Sapin II Law, applicable because it is a French company. The registration processes were fragmented, with different codes of conduct and the absence of a unified systemic solution.
Additionally, the company dealt with:
High volume of new registrations (300 to 400 suppliers/month).
Lack of historical cleansing of the legacy base.
Pressure to meet honorability, anti-corruption, ESG, and data protection criteria.
The Journey: Building the Supplier Honorability Project
The project began with the mobilization of a multidisciplinary team, involving compliance, purchasing, technology, legal, operations, and IT partners.
Project Phases:
Planning and budgeting: strategic and financial feasibility.
Requirement mapping: active listening to areas to understand what needed to be analyzed for each type of supplier.
Benchmark and solution selection: Linkana was chosen for having the greatest technical and functional adherence to the established criteria.
Privacy by Design: the tool underwent rigorous information security and LGPD evaluations, ensuring data protection and integrity.
Workflow construction: integration with SAP via API, maintaining the 48h SLA and automating onboarding.
Governance definition: clear processes for exception analysis, risk assumption, and auditing.
The Solution: Linkana as a Central Onboarding and Compliance Platform
Linkana became the centralizing platform for registration, due diligence, and monitoring, solving the main issues:
Main adopted features:
Onboarding automation with direct integration to SAP.
Data and document collection directly by the supplier via the portal.
Risk analysis in seconds, crossing multiple sources (slave labor, corruption, ESG, legal, banking).
Classification of suppliers by score (A to E), with criteria based on internal criticality policies.
Continuous monitoring and governance for evaluating off-standard cases.
The Intelligence of Risk Scoring
Every supplier starts with 100 points and loses points as risk indicators are identified.
Examples:
Slave labor or corruption: -100 points (automatic rejection).
Fiscal or legal irregularities: -20 to -60 points, depending on the category.
Informational alert (e.g., Serasa): light loss (0 to 7 points), only for monitoring.
Suppliers are classified as:
A | Approved with excellence |
B | Approved |
C | Approved with monitoring |
D | Requires internal evaluation |
E | Rejected (unacceptable risk) |
The tool was calibrated with different weights according to category criticality: allocated labor, environmental services, office supplies, etc.
Concrete Results
The transformation was broad, fast, and scalable:
🚀 Reduced registration SLA to less than 48 hours.
🛡️ Reinforced legal security, mitigating contractual risks.
📊 Real scalability with the capacity to manage up to 10 thousand active suppliers.
⚙️ Operational agility: automated analyses replacing manual processes.
🧭 Solid and auditable governance, with internal workflow and record of decisions.
Learnings and Strategic Highlights
Michelle López highlights a key point:
“There are many tools. The difference is knowing your business and parameterizing the solution to reflect the reality, risks, and priorities of your company.”
Other learnings:
Compliance projects need protagonism: leadership involvement, budgeting, and strategic sponsorship.
Integration is fundamental: scale is only gained through automation.
Intelligent scoring is the way: classifying, handling exceptions, and monitoring based on clear policy.
Continuous monitoring: the supplier is not validated just once, but throughout their journey.
Conclusion: From Compliance to Competitive Advantage
Leroy Merlin's case with Linkana shows how to transform an operational bottleneck into a strategic asset for compliance and governance.
More than meeting legal requirements, the company gained agility, security, and the ability to scale with control. The experience reinforces that investing in robust, adaptable, and integrated solutions like Linkana is the path for companies that want to grow sustainably.
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