Insight
The questions to ask about your procurement, and what it takes to answer them
The questions to ask about your procurement are almost all multi-hop questions: they cross a contract, a purchase order, a goods receipt and an invoice. An ERP (enterprise resource planning system) export gives you one table at a time. Insight queries the graph that connects those objects, and opens every figure onto its lines.
The problem
A buyer’s question never fits in a single table
“How much did we spend with this supplier?” is never the real question. The real question adds: across all entities, over twenty-four months, and under which contract. Each addition is another hop: supplier to group, group to entities, entity to contract, contract to the invoiced line.
An ERP answers well what it was built to track. It cannot join what was never modelled together. Hence the usual detour: one extract per entity, a spreadsheet to glue them back, and a week’s delay on the question. The answer lands after the decision it was meant to inform.
The question is never “how much did we spend”. It is “how much, with whom, under which contract, and how long has it been drifting”.
The six questions a buyer asks
These are the ones raised before a renegotiation. None of them is answered by an export.
- You first need to know which legal entities belong to the same supplier group: often five for a single point of contact. Without entity resolution the total is wrong: it splits across as many lines as there are trading names.
- Three hops: supplier reference to internal item, item to the price list or rate schedule that prices it, schedule to the period in which the invoice was issued. A price without a date compares to nothing.
- Drift is read on a dated series, in a comparable unit. So units of measure must have been converted and the internal classification aligned; otherwise the comparison is between different things.
- The answer lives in no table. It is derived from the crossing of the references bought, the suppliers that supply them and the contracts that cover them. It is a question about structure, not about amounts.
- Freight, fuel surcharges and minimum order fees arrive on other lines, sometimes on other invoices. They have to be attached to the same contract for the full cost to appear, rather than the negotiated unit price alone.
- One question containing ten: real volumes, prices paid, gaps to the negotiated terms, credit notes never applied, indexation deadlines. Insight assembles the file and shows where each piece comes from. The buyer decides what to do with it.
The six questions a finance department asks
They are about commitment and about the gap to budget. They usually arrive the day before a committee meeting.
- A supplier on record is not covered spend. The calculation requires linking every invoiced line to the contract that governs it, and counting as uncovered whatever has none. Two reading axes, category and entity, on the same relationship.
- A credit note promised in an email exchange and never applied appears in no balance. It has to be attached to its originating invoice to become a visible receivable again, with its age.
- Three objects to connect: the indexation clause, the index it names, and the volumes already committed under that contract. The arithmetic is simple; the link is what is missing everywhere.
- The complement of the coverage rate, but over a short window and on commitment rather than on what has been paid. The same relationship, read while the spend can still be corrected.
- The second half of the question is the hard one. “Where does it come from” means walking down from the cost line to the invoices, then to the invoice lines that explain the gap, one by one.
- The decomposition isolates three effects, provided you have quantities, dated unit prices and a stable classification. It is the textbook case of a multi-hop question.
What this changes
The question is asked in plain language, inside the tool. It is translated into a query over the graph, not into a text search: because the relationships are explicit, the joins are exact. Whatever is not known is declared as such: a missing figure returns “I do not have that information”, never an estimate.
A useful analysis is kept: the query becomes a dashboard, replayable next month on the same rules. And every value stays openable: the lines that make it up, then the document each line came from. It investigates, you decide.
Procurement intelligence · Insight
Ask the question. It builds the analysis, and shows where every figure comes from.
Translates a question asked in plain language into a query over the graph and the procurement database, computes, and returns the useful form: a figure, a table, a curve, a dashboard. It reads, it does not write. Every value opens onto the lines that make it up, and every line onto its source document.
The delay between the question and the answer. A buyer preparing a renegotiation no longer waits for a slot with the data team.
What Insight detects
- A category whose price has been drifting for months
- A contract coverage rate falling, by category and by entity
- Credit notes outstanding, with whom and for how long
- A single-source reference with no alternative on record
- A gap between the budget for a cost line and what was actually invoiced
- An increase driven by mix or volume rather than price
- A missing figure: declared as missing, never estimated
Nothing is lost. Everything can be checked, everything can be proven.
- The contract clause and the invoice line, highlighted side by side.
- Every extracted value stays linked to the exact place in the document where it was read.
- The same case produces the same decision, today as in six months: the rules are applied deterministically.
- No discrepancy is set aside in silence. Anything that matches no rule is raised, with its reason.
- The agent records what it did, in the order it did it: who, what, how much, when.
Frequently asked questions
Why does an ERP export not answer these questions?
Because an export delivers one table, and these questions cross four or five. The ERP runs a process: an order, an invoice, an account. It cannot join what nobody modelled together: the supplier group, the indexation clause, the converted unit, the period. The graph carries those relationships explicitly.
Do you need to write a query to ask these questions?
No. The question is asked in plain language, the way you would ask an analyst. Insight translates it into a query over the graph and the procurement database, computes, and returns the useful form: a figure, a table, a curve or a dashboard. Whatever is not known is declared as such, never estimated.
How do I check a Zylio conclusion?
Every discrepancy opens onto its evidence: the contract clause and the invoice line, highlighted side by side, with the calculation shown.
Who uses Zylio day to day?
Procurement, management control, finance and accounting. The interface is designed to be read by executives as much as by operational teams.
Measurable impact in every environment
More than 5 million procurement documents analysed
Between 1 and 7% of margin recovered
on the scope analysed
From 15 to 45% of time given back to teams, per FTE
depending on the scope and on data maturity
Zylio fits into your existing ecosystem.
The ERP runs the process. Zylio handles the exception and recovers the value that escapes it: invoices without a purchase order, line-by-line price discrepancies, duplicates and overbilling, off-contract spend.
Your data under high security.
Zylio meets the most demanding standards, and nothing is committed without your approval.
- Certifications
- Hosting
- Encryption
- Access
Read next
- Procurement intelligenceInsight: on-demand procurement analysis, verifiable figure by figure.
- Connect your procurement data to Power BIThe clean datasets your reporting tool already knows how to consume.
- The contract coverage rateHow much of your spend is genuinely governed by a contract.
- Price-volume-mix analysisIsolating the price, volume and mix effects behind an increase.
- Procurement analysis in-house or by a consulting firmWhat changes when the answer arrives the same day.
See what this looks like on your own data
Twenty minutes, on a spend category of your choosing. We show you what the agents detect, with the evidence behind it.
- No commitment, on your own data
- Result in 3 weeks
- 20 minutes, no sales pitch
- Your data stays hosted in France
- No change of tool or process