Most procurement teams have been there: opening a vendor master only to find the same supplier listed under multiple variations of its name. For Alex Denomme, now a Solution Engineer at TealBook and formerly a Senior Manager in a Procurement Center of Excellence at a Fortune 10 company, that challenge wasn’t theoretical, it was personal.
“We were trying to identify what our true supplier base was,” Alex recalled, “and you would find the same vendor set up different ways.”
He spent countless hours cleaning spreadsheets, trying to reconcile duplicates. Eventually, he realized that without a consistent foundation for supplier records, the problem would keep repeating.
“I had just come up against the wall and was like, ‘This is objectively not worth anybody’s time.’”
That moment reflects what many procurement teams experience daily: incomplete, disconnected supplier data that slows down strategy, obscures visibility, and undermines confidence.
Grounding Supplier Data Through Entity Resolution
The path forward begins with redefining what a supplier truly is and that starts with entity resolution.
As Alex explained, “At TealBook, we think it’s really important to be grounding your vendor master data in a legal entity.” In other words, each supplier should connect to a verified, registered business entity that can be traced back to the official business registration record filed within its jurisdiction.
This approach turns disconnected vendor records into a structured, verifiable network of suppliers. “If you define every one of your suppliers and vendors as a legal entity,” said Alex, “you can always take that entity back to the point of registration with a government body.”
Grounding supplier data in legal entity data ensures procurement teams know exactly who they’re doing business with, and eliminates confusion caused by naming inconsistencies or duplicate records.
What Entity Resolution Means for Procurement
Entity resolution is the process of identifying, matching, and linking data that refers to the same real-world entity across multiple records or systems. In procurement, it means consolidating all variations of a supplier’s name, registration number, and identifiers into one verified profile.
At TealBook, this process is powered by legal entity data, which is verified information tied to a company’s official business registration.
“Once you understand that all vendors are registered businesses within a given jurisdiction,” Alex explained, “the ability to then match to those profiles becomes kind of the core component of your vendor entity resolution.”
By anchoring supplier data to legal entities, procurement can enrich records with:
- Firmographics (such as size, location, and industry)
- Diversity certifications
- Risk scores
- Corporate hierarchies grounded in verifiable truth
This enriched, entity-resolved view allows procurement to:
- See supplier ownership and diversity certifications clearly
- Track changes across business units or parent companies
- Strengthen compliance and risk management with verified data
The Cost of Poor Entity Resolution
Without accurate entity resolution, procurement operations become reactive and error-prone.
“Poor supplier data impacts a lot of procurement activities,” Alex noted, including category planning and sourcing. “When your supplier data is lacking or inaccurate or it’s aged, you end up doing a lot of manual work to try and track down those suppliers.”
Even routine spend analysis can go wrong when relationships between parent companies and subsidiaries aren’t visible. Alex recalled how, in his previous role, analysts on his team often faced this issue.
“They’d say like, ‘Hey, what’s our relationship with IBM?’” Alex said. “You’d often see analysts coming up with the wrong answers because they didn’t also know that Red Hat was a subsidiary of IBM.”
Without visibility into those corporate connections, even simple questions produced inconsistent or incomplete insights. The result? Incomplete visibility, fragmented supplier management, and missed opportunities for efficiency.
The Power of Entity Resolution Using Legal Entity Data
When supplier data is matched to legal entities, clarity replaces complexity. Procurement teams can see how records consolidate, how companies connect, and where leverage exists across the supply base.
Alex shared what often happens during TealBook’s proof-of-value process:
“You may have had a vendor master of 15,000 vendor records but by the time that we’re done matching them down to legal entities and then rolling up those legal entities through the corporate hierarchy to an ultimate vendor parent, we often find that they’re working with way less vendors than they think they are.”
He’s seen as many as 63 vendor records compress into a single corporate parent. “From a sourcing or contracting perspective,” he said, “there’s so much opportunity and so many of the procurement folks that I’ve been working with have seen that opportunity almost immediately.”
This is the true value of entity resolution: it enables visibility, efficiency, and confidence that every supplier record represents a real, validated business.
TealBook Labs: Experience Entity Resolution in Action
To help procurement professionals experience the power of entity resolution firsthand, TealBook created TealBook Labs—a hands-on environment for exploring how supplier data grounded in legal entities drives better outcomes.
“It’s a great opportunity for data analysts, data leaders, and procurement teams to learn about what legal entities are and why we find it best to ground all of your vendor master data in one,” Alex said.
Participants bring their own supplier records to see how TealBook’s platform resolves duplicates, enriches missing details, and maps corporate hierarchies.
“Seeing your own vendor master data in the TealBook platform is very eye-opening,” Alex added. “Maybe you had blank values before that we can now fill in with TealBook’s data.”
Ultimately, TealBook Labs helps teams transform insight into action.
“Having the legal entity be the foundation really gives you strong trust and provenance,” said Alex, “so that you can build your category plans and execute your strategies knowing your vendor data is verifiable down to the registry level.”
Kelsey McAnally is a Strategic Account Manager at TealBook.
