Coupa Software
A Comprehensive Approach to Spend Management

For years procurement has been considered a dreary back-office function with a contractual orientation. With the rise of intelligent spend management, however, the notion of procurement is changing, and it's perceived as an area, which holds great potential for cost savings and supply assurance. But take a closer look, and the existing procurement solutions in the market are not only clunky but hard to get up and running. For Coupa Software, one of the basic tenets behind their procurement software was to build a solution that's intuitive and easy to implement. The company's all-in-one, state-of-the-art software single-handedly offers full visibility into procurement, helps control and manage procurement spend, and save valuable time.

Today, Coupa Software is the go-to provider for organizations large and small to bring billions of dollars in cumulative spend under management. Behind Coupa's growing success is Rob Bernshteyn, the CEO of the company who has over two decades of experience and is a business software veteran.

SPEED UP PROCUREMENT

So how exactly is Coupa Software, empowering organizations to spend smarter? For starters, the solution greatly simplifies the purchase requisition and order processes. It acts as a guide for employees, by surfacing preferred products and services to alert them of discounted pricing and other advantageous offers.

In today's fast-paced world, keeping up with changing business needs is a challenging task, mainly when the catalogs hosted in the system limits purchase requisition s. Sometimes when employees can't find what they need, they tend to engage in rogue spending. That's why Coupa Software and Amazon Business have teamed up to make it easy for employees to streamline business shopping. Coupa Open Buy, an open marketplace, offers a seamless shopping experience and access to millions of items without having to search through individual punch-out catalogs. Employees can shop with confidence, knowing that compliance is built in, and only those items are approved for payment, which are within company guidelines. Coupa Open Buy also combines checkout, approvals, and reporting in one place to improve visibility, compliance, and save time. Moreover, with Amazon's quick, reliable shipping means an employee can get their hands on what they need in a safer and faster manner.

The software also allows users to gain full visibility into the statement of work (SOW) by tracking time, materials, and costs. This enables procurement teams to ensure that suppliers are meeting service-level agreements (SLAs). If the situation demands, an employee can request different SOWs, which allows them to capture contingent labor details, delivery information, milestones, and rate cards. The solution increases collaboration with service providers and internal stakeholders to great extent as there are provisions for contractors to enter timesheets and service completion details easily. Employees and resource managers can even rate and add reviews for service providers to demarcate the best vendors. This ensures timely delivery and high-quality projects.

We have been maniacally focused on ensuring customer success because that is our number one core value at Coupa

Coupa's inventory management solution is another unique offering, which enables companies to eliminate overbuying and excess stock buildup, reduce repurchases and waste, and trim overall costs. Through this feature, the procurement team can not only receive internal orders and create fulfillment plans but also track and replenish stock at the right time and minimize carrying costs by reducing excess or obsolete inventory.

HARNESS THE POWER OF COLLECTIVE SOFTWARE

One of the most pertinent challenges when it comes to procurement is budgeting. Too often, budget owners must wait for weekly or monthly reports to see how much money has been spent. But with Coupa Budgets, employees receive real-time budgeting details in seconds, through a dashboard called budget meters, which helps eliminate and avoid overspending. An overview of requisitions that are pending approval and transactions approved against a budget is also provided. This allows organizations to drill down into details at the micro level. Coupa's budget-management software solution can be set up for organizations with multiple ERPs to give visibility into a budget spread across the organization or within departments, accounts, and projects.

Finally, in a world that runs on data, a component that cannot be ignored is security and fraud detection. Coupa's Spend Guard software powered by the latest artificial intelligence and machine learning techniques helps firms to detect errors and frauds automatically across all business spend. Spend Guard provides an auditor the overview of only suspicious activities, and dashboards reveal real-time risk analysis and visibility across departments, categories, and individual users. Since employees and suppliers engaging in fraudulent activities will generally not limit themselves to one application, Spend Guard scans data across the Coupa platform to identify suspicious activities and display them at a user level.

Given the extensive nature of their software, today industry behemoths such as Salesforce, Unilever, and Airbus all reach out to Coupa Software as their go-to procurement solutions provider. They are the solution of choice across industry verticals whether consumer packaged goods, financial services, hospitality, or energy and utilities. To better understand Coupa Software's unique value proposition, the story of Salesforce is a fitting example. The company's biggest challenge was around user experience. The users struggled with purchase requisitions and following it through. Before Coupa, Salesforce had a manual process in place where different regions used a different system. The foremost thing that Salesforce achieved with Coupa is a standard method for processing requisitions globally. Now 4000 user across finance, sourcing, and IT are using the single Coupa system. Moreover, Coupa's easy implementation, intuitive user interface, and adequate training ensured that the entire onboarding process was seamless. Coupa also lived up to Salesforce's growing needs as the software is completely scalable.

With Coupa Software users could gain access to timely reports without having to depend on IT teams to pull out reports from ERP systems. This fast tracked decision-making and gain instant visibility. Overall, Salesforce could reduce complexities in their spend profiles dramatically, manage their supply base effectively, and achieve actionable insights through analytics.

Recently, the Provident Financial Group (PFG), a leading provider of financial services in the nonstandard credit market selected Coupa to transform their procurement digitally. Coupa will replace the various infrastructure platforms that PFG currently uses. In a press release James Wagstaff, chief procurement officer at Provident Financial Group commented, "Coupa's approach to value as a service resonated strongly with us and, of all the systems we evaluated, Coupa stood out as the company with the clearest vision and focus on usability. This is truly the 'Rolls Royce' of systems, and we're proud to be working with Coupa through this implementation."

PROVIDING VALUE-AS-A-SERVICE

A major reason why Coupa Software is gaining quick recognition in the industry is their professional services. Each Coupa partnership starts with defining success for its customer. A dedicated account executive always works with clients to ensure goals are met throughout the implementation process and beyond. Bernshteyn states that "We have been maniacally focused on ensuring customer success because that is our number one core value at Coupa ." For the maximum benefit of clients, an initiative called the Coupa University extends online and in-person learning opportunities to help organizations make the most of the Coupa suite. Under this model, the company offers a multitude of training options, including web and live training. All Coupa users receive access to the company's main training site, where they can learn at their own pace. Besides, training certifications are also offered to customers and partners. In case a client faces any issues after go live, the Coupa Support team comprising expert engineers and developers that are also well versed in different languages take over. With various support centers spread across the globe, clients are covered round the clock.

Always looking at avenues to better their software, the company recently acquired the technology assets of DCR Workforce, a leading provider of contingent workforce management and services procurement software. The acquisition further solidified Coupa's vision of enabling businesses to manage all their business spend, including contingent workforce spend, within a comprehensive platform. "Effective visibility and control of contingent labor spend continues to be a growing priority for best-in-class organizations. When effectively managed, it delivers a material impact to the bottom line. Building upon Coupa's Services Maestro simple requisitioning, procurement, and tracking of SOW-based services offering, DCR Workforce will provide an advanced solution for the full lifecycle of the sourcing and management of contingent workers at scale," mentions Bernshteyn.

Over the years, procurement has transitioned from a business wing that simply "buys things" to a department that holds immense potential for cost savings and improved ROI. Disregarding the minutest of procurement needs, Coupa Software is the one-stop-shop for the modern era.