Frequently asked questions

No meetings are required. Your effort is the data export of one pilot product group, depending on your systems one to several hours. A short briefing at the start and a results meeting at the end are optional; we recommend both, together around two hours.

Invoice lines, cost per order or article, conditions such as discounts, rebates and freight, plus product and customer master data. As CSV or Excel, 36 months of history. You get a checklist with the concrete fields before the export, for SAP including field names, so your key users do not have to search.

You choose: an export as Excel or CSV, or read-only access if you prefer that. Neither involves write permissions. For the export we need no access at all. Only in the continuous platform stage does that choice become a permanent connection, read-only as well, limited to the fields you release.

Someone who decides which product group or which customers we look at, usually management or head of sales. And someone who pulls the export, typically controlling or a key user. Your IT does not need to grant anything for the scan.

One week from data handover. You receive the findings as a document and in your own read-only access; a results meeting is optional and recommended.

We hear that often and it is rarely a blocker. The scan starts with a data audit, so the first thing it tells you is what your data can support. Where fields are missing we work with documented approximations and label them as such. And if the data does not support a reliable statement, we say so instead of inventing a number.

It is processed for the Margin Scan and nothing else. Your numbers sit in your access for as long as it runs, four weeks. After that we delete the access and our working copies. On request you receive a written deletion confirmation listing every storage location individually, including the honest note that encrypted backups are not searched individually but expire on their regular cycle.

In the EU, exclusively, with a European provider. Servers, storage and models run there, your analysis data does not leave the EU. Supporting services, for example for file exchange, also run in EU regions. The full list, there are three, is available on request, and for the platform stage as an annex to the data processing agreement.

No. The scan works on business data: articles, quantities, prices, costs, conditions. You replace customer names and sales rep names with keys before handover, the mapping table stays with you. Because no personal data is processed, no data processing agreement is required for the Margin Scan. Strictly speaking this is pseudonymisation rather than anonymisation, because the keys have to stay consistent across all files, which is why we call it that. For the continuous platform stage we do conclude a data processing agreement.

Not on your individual data. To improve our own models we use aggregated analyses only, with no way back to individual articles, customers or companies. If you would rather we did not do even that, we put it in the contract.

No. We run our models self-hosted in our own EU infrastructure. No commercial model provider is involved, and therefore none is a sub-processor. Your data does not leave the EU.

No, and we are not going to pretend otherwise. ISO 27001 is a 12 to 18 month, five-figure process, not something a company our size can represent credibly. What we do have: documented technical and organisational measures, a data processing agreement with annexes, exactly three sub-processors because we run our models and CRM ourselves, and the willingness to walk you through the actual architecture in 15 minutes. If your procurement needs a specific artefact, talk to us.

You export your data and all analyses in open formats before we delete. The periods for that are set out in the contract. There is no proprietary format your results could be locked into.

We inform you without undue delay, as a rule within 48 hours. That is deliberately shorter than the 72 hours you have towards the supervisory authority as the controller, you should keep time to act.

A fixed price, quoted before you start and independent of how much we find. If you go on to work with the platform, the scan fee is credited in full within 2 months (signature, not implementation). Write to hello@valento.io and we send you the offer.

That depends on portfolio size, data volume and number of sites, and is quoted individually. You get an offer on request, including before the scan, if you want to know beforehand.

Then it ends, at no further cost. You keep the analysis. About a third of scans lead to no engagement, that is planned for on our side, not an exception you need to explain.

Term, notice period and price adjustment are discussed together with the offer. We are happy to send you the draft contract for review before you commit to the scan.

A still image of one pilot product group at one point in time: identified potential, broken down into concrete cases with article number, customer, period and amount. Plus the recurring patterns in your data, prices that have not moved while costs rose; spreads on the same article between customers; the gap between calculated and invoiced margin. And an ROI projection with assumptions stated. The full documentation is yours to keep. On top of that you get your own access with your numbers in it, for four weeks, because we delete your data afterwards. The access lives on your numbers; without them there would be nothing to show.

No market price estimate and no automated price setting, neither is credible without market data. We also write nothing back into your ERP. And we do not tell you which deviation you can push through: contracts, framework agreements and commitments are not in the data extract. The scan works with what the numbers show, it is evidence on one slice, not a full assessment of your pricing policy.

Every figure comes from your own invoice data, not from benchmarks, and every one can be looked up in your systems. What we report is identified potential, not realised profit. Whether and how much of it you capture is decided by your sales team, not by our model.

So far we have found something in every analysis. But do not take our word for it: request an anonymised case study, or speak to one of our customers beforehand. We arrange the contact on request.