Leroy Merlin | Success stories

Leroy Merlin, one of the largest retailers in Brazil, faced a critical challenge: how to ensure governance, compliance and risk management over a base of more than 30,000 suppliers?

The answer came through the Supplier Honorability Program, deployed 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 beyond: truly knowing our suppliers, managing risk, ensuring governance and scaling safely.”

The Governance-at-Scale Challenge

With nationwide, large-scale operations, Leroy Merlin Brazil faced a critical challenge: how to ensure governance, compliance and risk management over a base of more than 30,000 suppliers?

Complexity was even higher given category diversity (resale, non-resale, carriers, marketplace) and the obligation to follow international regulations, such as the Sapin II Law, applicable as a French company. Onboarding processes were fragmented, with different codes of conduct and no unified systemic solution.

In addition, the company was dealing with:

High volume of new records (300 to 400 suppliers/month).
No historical cleanup of the legacy base.
Pressure to meet honorability, anti-corruption, ESG and data protection criteria.

The Journey: Building the Supplier Honorability Program

The project started by mobilizing a multidisciplinary team, involving compliance, procurement, technology, legal, operations and IT partners.

Project Phases:

Planning and budget: strategic and financial enablement.
Requirements mapping: active listening to areas to understand what needed to be analyzed for each supplier type.
Benchmark and solution selection: Linkana was chosen for having the highest technical and functional fit with the established criteria.
Privacy by Design: the tool underwent rigorous information security and LGPD evaluations, ensuring data protection and integrity.
Workflow construction: SAP integration via API, maintaining a 48h SLA and automating onboarding.
Governance definition: clear processes for exception analysis, risk acceptance and audit.

The Solution: Linkana as the Central Onboarding and Compliance Platform

Linkana came in as the central onboarding, due diligence and monitoring platform, solving the main pain points:

Main features adopted:

Onboarding automation with direct SAP integration.
Data and document collection directly from the supplier via portal.
Risk analysis in seconds, crossing multiple sources (forced labor, corruption, ESG, legal, banking).
Supplier classification by score (A to E), with criteria based on internal criticality policies.
Continuous monitoring and governance for evaluating non-standard cases.

The Intelligence of the Risk Score

Every supplier starts with 100 points and loses points as risk indicators are identified.

Examples:

Forced labor or corruption: -100 points (automatic rejection).
Tax or legal irregularities: -20 to -60 points, by category.
Informational alert (e.g., Serasa): light loss (0 to 7 points), only for monitoring.

Suppliers are classified into:

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: outsourced labor, environmental services, office supplies, etc.

Concrete Results

The transformation was broad, fast and scalable:

🚀 Onboarding SLA reduction to less than 48 hours.
🛡️ Reinforced legal certainty, mitigating contractual risk.
📊 Real scalability with capacity to manage up to 10,000 active suppliers.
⚙️ Operational agility: automated analyses replacing manual processes.
🧭 Solid, auditable governance, with internal workflow and decision logging.

Lessons and Strategic Highlights

Michelle López highlights a key point:

“Tools exist in abundance. The difference is knowing your business and parameterizing the solution to reflect the reality, risks and priorities of your company.”

Other lessons:

Compliance projects need leadership: involvement of executives, budget and strategic sponsorship.
Integration is fundamental: scale only comes with automation.
Smart scoring is the path: classify, handle exceptions and monitor with a clear policy.
Continuous monitoring: the supplier isn’t validated once, but throughout their journey.

Conclusion: From Compliance to Competitive Advantage

The Leroy Merlin + Linkana case shows how to turn an operational bottleneck into a strategic compliance and governance asset.

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 looking to grow sustainably.