Much like Salesforce revolutionized Customer Relationship Management (CRM), Coupa set out in 2009 to address a core business process in need of a technology makeover: Business Spend Management (BSM).
At the time, businesses were forced to use disparate and cumbersome on-premise legacy solutions to manage their spend. Designed for the back office, these solutions lacked agility, and used antiquated technologies that were expensive to maintain and hindered growth, with poor user adoption and a lack of insights into how to better manage that spend. BSM processes — from sourcing to payments were inefficiently managed at best, resulting in significant waste, and, at worst, left businesses vulnerable to fraud and risks lurking in their spend.
Coupa set out to change this and created a comprehensive and open platform that delivers long-term measurable value, a rarity in the world of software, and that is easy to use for everyone, ensuring high adoption.
Today, the Coupa BSM Platform, which manages nearly $1 trillion in spend, is used by hundreds of customers, from mid-sized regional businesses to large global enterprises, including Airbus, MGM Resorts International, and Rolls-Royce. It is consistently ranked as a leader in BSM by top analyst firms and with a successful IPO in 2016 and continued growth, the company has proven the need for BSM and is just getting started.
Coupa: agility that powers competitive advantage
Companies across all industries–including financial services, retail, healthcare, and manufacturing, among others–unlock a competitive advantage with Coupa. In addition to digitizing and streamlining business spend processes, the platform leverages actual business operating data across its global customer base to provide Community Intelligence, actionable insights, and automated optimization to reduce cost, mitigate risk, and support business growth.
At its core, Coupa supports purchase requisition and order processes with real- tracking to maximize pre-approved spend and give complete visibility of the entire Purchase-to-Pay process. From automating invoice management to digitizing employee expense management, Coupa simplifies every business spend touchpoint. The comprehensive solution offers modular power applications which enable Coupa to grow with businesses as more spend management needs arise.
Most recently, Coupa launched Coupa Pay, which offers businesses a set of payment and financing solutions to manage payments as part of their broader business spend management strategy. Through partnerships with leading financial institutions such as Barclaycard and J.P. Morgan, businesses can now use virtual card solutions to reduce risk and streamline reconciliation.
Coupa’s breadth of business spend applications, ease of configurability, and ability to grow with businesses make the platform ideal for businesses at any stage of growth operating in any part of the world. This is one of the secrets behind the success of Coupa, “a unique philosophy of ‘start anywhere, go anywhere,’ which delivers business agility,” said Donna Wilczek, vice president of product strategy & innovation at Coupa.
Employees and suppliers really can go anywhere with Coupa–the platform is accessible in the cloud from any desktop or mobile device. One of the company’s mottos is “the best UI is no UI.” Simply put, this means that processes that don’t need user interaction should be automated, and those that do should be easy to complete with as few steps as possible, from wherever you are.
Reacting to business changes with Coupa is fast and easy. Finance and procurement teams can rapidly configure Coupa to serve new requirements, unlike legacy technologies, where those changes require IT support and expensive external consultants.
Sanofi, one of the world’s largest biotech companies based in France, sought Coupa’s help to improve its BSM processes. The company was using global purchasing tools for more than 10 years that were increasing complexity and decreasing employee efficiencies with every passing day. Coupa integrated multiple instances of SAP and delivered a user and supplier experience that reduced effort and confusion, enabling Sanofi to cut down expensive IT-driven customization and achieve business agility. With the Coupa BSM Platform implemented across more than 70 countries and running on many instances of SAP, Sanofi has gained greater visibility into €10 billion worth of spend per year, all with a very high user approval rating.
Smarter, together – Coupa Community Intelligence
Building the most comprehensive, user-centric and scalable BSM solution means that innovation is a priority.
At the center of the platform is the Coupa Community – consisting of insights from nearly $1 trillion of spend data. With Coupa Community Intelligence, customers get access to prescriptive spend insights leveraging real-time spend behavior as part of their daily experience. These insights help them mitigate risk, remain compliant, identify smarter spending opportunities, and improve process efficiencies across all their business spend.
For example, Coupa Commodity Insights optimizes category spend so companies can find the best supplier to meet their needs, while Supplier Insights enable customers to search for community-vetted best-in-class suppliers, identify the best suppliers by item, region, and more. And, all of this incorporates benchmarking visibility so companies can see exactly how they stack up against peers, competitors, and best-in-class companies.
Also available through Coupa’s Community Intelligence are powerful tools that assess and identify risk and fraud proactively. Through Coupa Risk Aware, customers can have visibility into every supplier including information on credit scores, news sentiment, and more to identify risk proactively and avoid business disruptions. Spend Guard makes fraud detection automatic for a Coupa customer by building expected behavior profiles based on community intelligence and AI to flag suspicious activities so that fraud and spend leakages can be caught with fewer audits.
For the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society (LLS), this kind of real-time supplier risk information is a game changer. Coupa Community Intelligence is intelligently applying AI and analytics across an extensive community to flag risky suppliers that the organization conducts significant spend with that would have gone noticed otherwise. With this insight, LLS is able to make real-time decisions to minimize supply chain risk.
All of Coupa’s efforts are grounded in its core values of ensuring customer success, focusing on results, and striving for excellence. These three values sit at the center of every move the company makes and focus on enabling its customers and suppliers to flourish.
“Above everything else, we are passionate about customer success,” says Wilczek. “At the end of the day, what matters most is the measurable value that our customers get with Coupa.”
