Private sector
Private sector: control indirect spend across every subsidiary, framework contract by framework contract
In the private sector, indirect procurement is negotiated at head office and executed in subsidiaries, often on several ERPs. Zylio reads the framework contracts and the invoices of each entity, checks every line against the rate negotiated for the group and brings up discrepancies with their proof. Without touching the ERPs, without contacting any supplier.
The situation
What makes indirect procurement hard to control in a private company
The terms are good. What is missing is the certainty that they are applied everywhere.
Negotiated at head office, invoiced in the subsidiary
The framework contract is signed by group procurement. Orders go out from ten entities, and each receives its invoices. Nobody rereads the contract at that point.
Several ERPs, several master data sets
One subsidiary on SAP, another on Sage, a recent acquisition on Dynamics. The same supplier carries three codes, the same item three references.
Control by sampling
A few invoices a month pass under a controller’s eyes. The rest is paid on the strength of the ERP’s matching, which compares totals.
Off-contract purchases
An entity orders from a supplier that is not referenced, or outside the contract scope, at list price. Head office learns of it at consolidation, or never.
Invisible supplier performance
Volume discounts, price revisions, service penalties: every negotiated clause has a counterpart that nobody tracks over time.
Value that is hard to prove
Procurement knows it negotiates well. It cannot demonstrate, line by line, what its agreements have given back to the group.
The mechanism
Every invoice of every entity, checked against the group framework contract
Zylio reads your framework contracts as they are (signed PDFs, pricing annexes, amendments, country grids) and extracts every condition: price per item, discounts, volume tiers, revision formula, due dates. A framework contract can carry more than 12,000 price lines, pricing rules included; the platform holds them.
Then every invoiced line, in every subsidiary, is checked against the condition that governs it. The Compliance agent brings up the invoiced price above the negotiated price, the revision applied outside its due date, the volume tier crossed but not passed on, the service outside the scope. The Matching agent reconciles order, receipt and invoice at line level; the Exception agent takes on invoices without an order, duplicates and credit notes never applied.
Each discrepancy comes up with the clause and the invoiced line, highlighted side by side, and its amount. The subsidiary or head office decides: claim, accept, renegotiate. Nothing is committed without validation.
The use case: verify that the rate negotiated at head office is the one invoiced everywhere.
Several ERPs
One control, whatever the subsidiary’s ERP
Zylio does not ask you to harmonise your systems. It reads the exports or the API of each ERP (SAP, Sage, Oracle, Microsoft Dynamics 365, NetSuite, Cegid, Workday) and writes nothing back. Each entity’s approval flows stay in place; investigated discrepancies go back into them.
Graph, the knowledge graph layer, recognises the same supplier under its different legal names and the same item under its different references, from one subsidiary to the next. Head office finally sees real spend per supplier, across all ERPs, and can compare the price paid for the same item from one entity to another.
What we read and what we never modify, ERP by ERP.
For whom
Large groups, mid-caps, SMEs: the same control, a different scope
Large groups
Dozens of entities, several countries, several ERPs. Control starts on one spend category or one region, then extends, with consolidated reporting for head office.
Mid-caps
A lean procurement team, recent framework contracts, one main ERP. Exhaustive control frees the team from sampling and gives it back time to negotiate.
SMEs
No dedicated procurement department, an owner or a CFO who signs. The three-week diagnostic is often enough to know whether continuous control is justified.
What private-sector groups have measured with Zylio, subsidiaries and ERPs included.
By industry
The private-sector industries Zylio already knows
Each industry has its documents, its suppliers and its typical discrepancies. Each has its own page.
Financial services
Professional services, IT, real estate: unit-of-work contracts and invoices running to several hundred lines.
Healthcare
Facilities and clinic groups: devices, consumables, maintenance, with price lists that keep moving.
Manufacturing
Maintenance, parts, energy, transport: dense rate cards and revisions indexed on raw materials.
Retail
Store networks and franchises: the same supplier, hundreds of delivery points, terms to be enforced everywhere.
Grocery retail
Massive volumes, year-end rebates, logistics: tiers and rebates to be checked to the euro.
Hospitality
Food, linen, energy, cleaning: purchases scattered by property and prices negotiated at group level.
The industry pages, with their documents and their typical discrepancies.
Getting started
A three-week diagnostic, on one subsidiary or one spend category
The shortest entry point is a three-week diagnostic, on your data. You choose a scope: an entity, a spend category, a major supplier. We read the contracts and invoices for the period, check every line against what was negotiated and hand back the discrepancies, quantified and sourced. The diagnostic is billed on success, on the discrepancies recovered.
On the scope analysed, recovered margin sits between 1% and 7%. And control can then extend from 5% to 100% of your spend, entity by entity, at your own pace.
Scope, data requested, deliverable, success-based billing.
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
Do all subsidiaries need to be on the same ERP?
No. Zylio reads the exports or the API of each ERP separately and modifies nothing in any of them. Graph then reconciles suppliers and references from one entity to the next. A group with three ERPs is a common case, not a prerequisite to remove.
Which entity or spend category should we start with?
The one where the framework contract is densest and the invoice volume highest: that is where discrepancies repeat the most. Professional services, maintenance, IT and logistics are frequent starting points. The expert call is there to help you choose.
Are suppliers informed or contacted?
Never by Zylio. Discrepancies go to your teams, with the clause and the invoiced line side by side. You decide whether to claim, accept or renegotiate, and you carry the conversation with the supplier, evidence in hand.
Can head office see the results of every subsidiary?
Yes, with access rights per entity. Head office has a consolidated view (discrepancies by supplier, by category, by subsidiary) and each entity sees its own. Every figure opens on the lines that make it up and on their source document.
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
Going further
- Compliance with your negotiated pricesThe pillar of invoice control against the contract, by the Compliance agent.
- Zylio for manufacturingMaintenance, parts, energy: the industry’s typical discrepancies and documents.
- Public sector: public contract execution controlRate schedules, public procurement and service acceptance: the public counterpart of this page.
- The 3-week diagnosticWhat was paid in error, on your data, billed on success.
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