Candex CEO Jeremy Lappin and Lyvio Frimat, Global Head of Procurement Centre of Excellence, Strategy & Transformation at Opella, discuss how their partnership simplifies procurement by streamlining tail spend management.

When Opella separated from pharmaceutical giant Sanofi in May 2025 and became an independent consumer health business, its Procurement Operations Lead, Lyvio Frimat, now Vice President- Global Head of Procurement Centre of Excellence, Strategy & Transformation at Opella, had worked with Candex previously.

“ Because of our initial association with Sanofi,” Jeremy Lappin, CEO of Candex, explains,“ they had a lot of confidence to do things quickly and powerfully with Candex.”

New business, new procurement functionality

Opella inherited a procurement landscape built for a global pharmaceutical company, not an agile standalone fast-moving consumer healthcare( FMCH) business. Tail spend was fragmented and largely invisible, and hundreds of low-value, one-time transactions were absorbing team bandwidth and creating compliance exposure.

Candex, a platform that helps large organisations manage and pay small and one-time vendors, offered a way to bring that segment under control without waiting for the wider source-to-pay architecture to mature. For Jeremy, it was“ a very unique situation where Candex is part of the core strategy” of a newly independent company. For Lyvio, the partnership with Candex is helping his team“ solve a problem most procurement transformations ignore until it is too late: how do you bring the entire spend base under governance without bringing the entire organisation to a standstill? The answer isn’ t more process – it is smarter architecture.”

Frictionless control

A core strand of Opella’ s solution to reduce procurement friction is to separate tail spend transactions from strategic, more complex procurement contracts.

With Candex, Opella’ s supplier onboarding, payment terms and compliance standards stay“ within a clear governance frame – while removing the process burden” that stifles procurement efficiency.

Opella’ s users notice. One requisitioner told Jeremy:“ It was so easy, I thought I did it wrong.” Candex, he says, is there to enable:“ Our job at Candex is not to exist. It’ s to sort of sit in the background.”