Savings

Covestro didn't buy a new procurement tool. Covestro sees Lio "as an important strategic component of our procurement transformation and as much more than just another procurement tool. It provides an intelligent layer between our requisitioners, procurement processes and backend systems."

That layer went live in Covestro's largest market within a few months. From there it rolled out region by region.

For the requester, none of that is visible. They type what they need. Lio searches the catalogs, applies the buying policy of their region, picks the compliant channel and the preferred supplier, and builds the request. "One of the biggest strengths is the user experience," Pala says. "Lio provides requisitioners with a single, intuitive entry point and guides them through the purchasing process."

Nobody was forced to use Lio but had a User Adoption of 90%.

Ariba stayed available too and any employee could keep buying the way they always had. Within months, over 90% of users had moved to Lio on their own.

Time to deploy more Agents

Once requests came through one door, Covestro could put agents behind it. The PR Review Agent reads every requisition. Missing cost center, wrong supplier, no quote attached: instead of a buyer catching it by hand, the agent finds what is missing and writes to the requester itself. Buyers see only the exceptions that need a decision.

Order Confirmation Agents run for indirect and direct material.

For direct material the bar is different. A laptop arriving a day late is an inconvenience. A raw material arriving a day late is a production problem. At Covestro, the agent reads the confirmed delivery time out of unstructured supplier documents and compares it against what SAP expects, so deviations surface before they reach the plant.

And in the tactical buying shared service center, the team that never had time to haggle now runs its negotiations with the Lio Negotiation Agent. Small orders that used to go through unnegotiated get negotiated, at scale, in whatever language the supplier speaks. The result: 7% additional savings on spend that had never been touched before.

This is the part Pala calls orchestration. "Lio allows us to combine guided buying, catalog search, procurement validation, approval routing and increasingly automated processing within one solution. This is particularly valuable in a complex global procurement environment such as Covestro's."

From operational buying to strategic sourcing

In Q1 2026, a second team at Covestro opened a second workstream with Lio: strategic procurement, direct materials, as a co-development partnership. A Central Sourcing Hub. The problem it solves sits before the tender. Covestro's strategic buyers run tenders across several specialized platforms, each good at one thing. Covestro didn't want to replace them. They wanted the work around them to stop being manual: collecting specifications from the business, analyzing spend and volumes, preparing the documents and Excel templates a tender needs. With Lio, the business uploads its requirements, the buyer adds theirs, and Lio builds the tender project, runs the spend analysis and generates the full package the tendering platforms need.