About the Client

Leroy Merlin (part of the global Adeo Group) is an absolute giant in the home improvement and building materials market. The numbers speak for themselves:

• 85 stores across Poland and a rapidly growing e-commerce business, supported by headquarters and a state-of-the-art logistics center.
• Over 12,000 employees dedicated to ensuring a great daily shopping experience for customers.
• A powerful e-commerce and marketplace ecosystem offering 2.3 million products.
• Impressive operational efficiency: 90% of orders are delivered to customers in less than 72 hours.

It is also a company deeply committed to social responsibility, having awarded over 1,036 grants to support local communities, schools, and institutions. Managing such a vast and distributed organization requires a technological backbone capable of handling the burden of thousands of daily operations.

The Challenge

Leroy Merlin’s journey toward digital excellence began in 2010, when the chain had only about 30 stores.

With rapid growth and a nearly threefold increase in the number of locations, the organization ran into a wall of administrative and operational challenges:

• Tons of paper and bottlenecks: The expansion of the organization generated massive amounts of paper documentation—from cash register reports, to business trip expense reports, to invoices, and even key contracts. Traditional information flow slowed down decision-making.
  
  
• A Leaky Legal Process: Contract management with hundreds of counterparties relied on physical documents and emails. This process carried a high risk of error—obtaining signatures and archiving took “weeks on end,” and verifying the final version of a document was difficult. Signed contracts often went missing, either in whole or in part (e.g., addenda).
  
  
• Complexity of the IT environment and new legislation: The organization had to integrate its extensive financial processes with a central, cloud-based Oracle system (without interfering with its core architecture) and prepare for upcoming KSeF requirements.
  
  
• Distributed work and tools: Managing a massive IT infrastructure (tens of thousands of devices), health and safety incidents, and the vehicle fleet required standardization so that employees from different parts of Poland could collaborate seamlessly.

Solution

The answer to these challenges was the implementation of Suncode’s Plus Workflow platform, which over the years has gained the status of a mission-critical IT system, operating side by side with the Oracle financial system. However, the integration with the Autenti platform proved to be a true “game changer” in the area of document management.

Key elements of the implementation:

• End-to-end process management: Over more than 15 years of collaboration with Suncode, Leroy Merlin has digitized over 30 key business processes (including HR, logistics, finance, and incident management).
  
  
• A revolution in the legal and procurement departments: Manual document workflowswere replaced with an automated process in Plus Workflow. Simultaneous document collaboration was enabled, and approval workflows were automated.
  
  
• Autenti electronic signature: The Autenti platform was implemented, enabling contracts to be signed instantly from anywhere in the world, offering, among other things, support for qualified electronic signatures.
  
  
• Artificial Intelligence in Finance: AI OCR modules were implemented in accounting to intelligently read, sort, and process invoices (both paper and email), optimizing the department’s operations ahead of the KSeF rollout.

Results

The digital transformation in the Leroy Merlin x Suncode x Autenti model delivered immediate, measurable results, fundamentally changing the organization’s work culture.

• Instant contract processing: The time from contract preparation to final signing and archiving has dropped from several weeks to as little as 1–2 days.
  
  
• A single central dashboard: Employees now have an integrated environment. Using a single tool, managers review contracts, approve delegations, and request signatures (regardless of the type of e-signature required by the contract or whether the counterparty wishes to use the system or if we use it solely for LM to sign the contract).
  
  
• Integrity and security: The risk of lost documents or unauthorized changes to content has been eliminated. Signed e-contracts go directly to the virtual archive and e-Folder.
  
  
• Cost savings and environmental friendliness: Costs associated with printing, manual processing, and courier services have been drastically reduced, which aligns with the company’s eco-friendly strategy.