Customer Love Story
tesa "only" wanted to reimagine their User Experience
...and just 10 weeks after kick off is now live with Lio globally
"We want this globally - end to end - running at full speed as soon as possible."
Mattea Herzberg
VP Global Procurement, tesa
The Company
tesa is almost everywhere, even when you don't see it. Most people know tesa as a consumer brand — “tesafilm” — but tesa is much more than that. Around 130 tesa tapes hold together a single electric vehicle. More than 70 are used inside a smartphone. tesa employs roughly 5,400 people across 11 production sites and provides adhesive solutions for more than 300 end applications.
The Challenge
To buy the right way, a requester had to know how Procurement wanted them to buy: which supplier was preferred, which channel was compliant, which of several disconnected shops and catalogs carried the item, and what to do when none of them did.
The problem was that most people didn't know and didn't want to know. So most requests came in as free text, and every one of them landed in front of a buyer who had to check it manually. Is the supplier approved? Is the price plausible? Is anything missing? If so, the buyer wrote an email, waited, and followed up.
Those buyers were hired to negotiate and source, but instead spent their days checking requests.
With Lio
Today, a tesa employee opens Lio and sees only what applies to their role, site, and approval level. They type what they need in plain language or upload a quote a vendor has already sent them. Lio reads it, selects the compliant channel and preferred supplier, and creates a fully compliant request.
Agents that finish the operational work
Every request still gets checked. What changed is who does the checking. Instead of humans, Lio Agents check each request against tesa's rules. When something is missing, the Agents act autonomously: they write to the requester, ask the supplier for the missing documents, and follow up until the request is complete. Then, they route it to the right approver. Buyers only see the exceptions that require a human decision — and nothing else.
As Fabian Bigus described it:
“We have now wound down all of our compliance reviewers, our PR reviewers, and they're now doing cool things with the Negotiation Agent.”
Beyond the user experience, tesa went even further and implemented Agents that source and negotiate tail spend — an area that was previously impossible for human buyers to address at scale. The buyers who used to check free-text requests now run the negotiations that matter and build supplier relationships they never had time for before.
Results
Go-Live after ten weeks of implementation start
The first countries went live just ten weeks after kickoff. Today, Lio is live on every continent where tesa operates: Europe, Asia, North America, and South America. Once Lio had built the foundation, adding another region required almost no additional effort — something tesa had never experienced before.
Strategic Partnership
What started as a project for one part of indirect procurement quickly expanded. Within six months of launch, tesa's entire procurement organization was on board and decided to bring Lio into strategic procurement as well.
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