How one of Italy’s largest retailers transformed supplier management into a value-creation process

One of Italy’s leading large-scale retail operators manages a particularly complex supplier ecosystem, encompassing both commercial partners and organizations involved in service provision, contracting, and subcontracting activities. The company operates through an extensive network of retail stores, logistics facilities, and production plants, coordinating thousands of suppliers across hundreds of product categories.
In a context of this complexity, ensuring effective supplier qualification, monitoring, and management processes is a strategic imperative to guarantee operational continuity, regulatory compliance, and risk mitigation.

The challenge

The complexity of the ecosystem managed by one of Italy’s leading large-scale retail companies is inevitably reflected in the management of its supplier network. This highly diversified universe can be broadly divided into two main categories: commercial and non-commercial suppliers. These range from branded manufacturers supplying products for resale, to partners providing raw materials and semi-finished goods, as well as organizations delivering services and managing contracts and subcontracting activities.
Overall, the company manages approximately 6.500 suppliers across more than 400 different product and service categories.
Managing such complexity while simultaneously establishing transparent supplier qualification processes required a significant step forward for the organization: moving from an unstructured system, lacking advanced functionalities and standardized scoring mechanisms, to a centralized platform capable of supporting not only a structured supplier registry but also an objective and measurable risk assessment model. This represented a critical enabler for a more effective and informed supplier selection process.
The company’s goal, however, was not simply to replace existing tools by migrating from a legacy environment to an off-the-shelf solution. Its ambition was far greater: to introduce a new methodology capable of enabling a single, traceable, and shared qualification workflow across the entire value chain.
This approach was designed to reduce risk for the organization, and above all for its customers, while ensuring the flexibility required to adapt continuously to an evolving regulatory landscape.
With this objective in mind, the new platform needed to integrate natively with the company’s ERP system and the broader application ecosystem, ensuring operational continuity, preventing potentially harmful data duplication, and supporting consistent, centralized information management throughout the entire supplier lifecycle.
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The Approach

The company therefore turned to YUBIQ to implement a centralized digital solution designed to cover the various stages of the supplier qualification process, involving only those stakeholders directly within the scope of supplier assessment activities.
The platform is built around a structured risk assessment workflow that combines questionnaires, score assignment, and automated scoring mechanisms. This approach enables the risk level of each supplier to be identified accurately, objectively, and consistently.
One of the system’s most innovative features is its ability to tailor the assessment process to the characteristics of each individual supplier. Rather than applying a one-size-fits-all approach, the platform evaluates specific KPIs and special cases based on the impact a supplier may have on a particular business area, creating a qualification journey that is proportionate to the actual level of risk involved.
The model also distinguishes between suitability assessment tools and risk assessment tools. The former rely on technical questionnaires designed to verify compliance with the required standards, while the latter enable targeted investigations into particularly sensitive and specialized areas. These include, for example, tax compliance and ESG factors, which are becoming increasingly critical in evaluating the risks associated with awarding contracts and subcontracting activities.
Every stage of the process is supported by continuous monitoring. The platform allows the company to move beyond a traditional “one-time” verification approach and adopt a dynamic model capable of continuously identifying and assessing risks related to supplier activities over time.
Achieving this level of granularity during the qualification and contracting phases required the centralization of the company’s entire document repository. The platform consolidates not only contracts, but also attachments, amendments, and all related commercial documentation within a single environment.
This evolution represents a further step forward in the company’s digital transformation journey and opens up new opportunities for the future. Among them is the introduction of natively digital contracts, which will make the entire supplier management lifecycle even more efficient, traceable, and seamlessly integrated.

The Impact

The project was launched in May 2024 and involved an extensive preliminary analysis phase conducted in collaboration with YUBIQ. Through a series of design thinking sessions and dedicated workshops, YUBIQ translated the client’s requirements into a digital solution that embeds proven best practices and makes them available across the organization.
Thanks to this approach, the rollout and adoption of the platform were both rapid and effective. Today, approximately 100 departments and 600 internal users are connected to the system. On the supplier side, more than 9,000 contacts have been onboarded, including 1,100 suppliers classified as high-priority or high-attention. Since its implementation, the platform has already collected and assessed around 300,000 documents.
From an operational perspective, the company is now close to completing the supplier qualification program, which required a complete overhaul of the screening activities previously performed through the legacy system. Even at this stage, however, a number of significant benefits are already evident.
First and foremost, the organization has substantially improved its operational efficiency by reducing manual activities and dramatically decreasing information redundancy. At the same time, risk management teams can now rely on objective criteria and continuous assessment tools, enabling more informed decision-making and ongoing support for supplier qualification activities.
Last but not least, the company now benefits from a single, centralized data repository that can serve as a trusted source of information not only for supplier management purposes but also for other business functions across the organization.
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