Coupa Blog

Multiply the happiness with expense management automation

Tony Darugar — Thu, 06 Jun 2013 14:57:30 -0400

How often does the finance department get an opportunity to make lots and lots of people really, really happy?

Last month, Paystream Advisors published their annual Travel and Expense Benchmark report surveying AP and Finance professionals at a wide range of companies on their travel and expense management practices. Expense reports are a topic that tends to generate more horror stories than happiness. But that can change.

In my last Making Cents blog post, I talked what stood out most for me in the Benchmark Report: the huge difference in cost per expense report between companies using manual processes ($20.18/expense report), vs. those using fully automatedAutomating expense reports can create good karma and multiply happiness at your company. systems ($7.60 /expense report). It’s almost a 3X difference!

What surprised me even more is that despite these exponential costs, the most common reason for not automating is the belief that current systems are working fine, and there’s little ROI to be had from automation.

In my post, I did the math, and that’s clearly not the case. Most companies can realize significant savings on processing costs alone, not to mention indirect costs from such things as delayed processing of reports, lack of visibility, inability to negotiate discounts and employee dissatisfaction.

If that’s not enough, consider this: Expense reports are one of the few things finance deals with on a daily basis that actually touch everyone at the company in a significant way. This can be a big win for finance, for a couple of reasons.

The majority of employees will be doing expense reports on a somewhat regular basis. So, when you introduce efficiency and ease of use into that process you immediately touch a very large number of people at the company. You also introduce happiness for a very large number of people. There’s a lot of good karma created; this is something finance can do to help a lot of people.

Granted, creating good karma and making people happy are not normally finance department KPIs. But the finance department benefits as well.

Not only do expense reports touch a lot of people, for many people this (and getting their paycheck) is their window into what your job is. If you present them with an antiquated system, then the impression you make is one of inefficiency and unnatural, unusable systems.

Taking the pain out of expense reports is good internal marketing for finance. The employees in the company will have a better impression of what it is that you do, and perhaps of the company as a whole. It builds trust and confidence for other, future initiatives coming out of finance.

Automating expense management improves productivity for AP and finance, and it also has a ripple effect on productivity across the company. If every week I have to ping finance or my boss to check on my reimbursement, that’s one more thing I have to keep on my calendar and manage.

That effort can be significant for people that are the nexus of expense reports coming in, for example, the VP of sales. That person’s happiness or dissatisfaction is multiplied across all the people that report to him or her. So is their productivity, or lack of productivity.

I was at a training recently for a company getting started with our automated expense solution, and there was a gathering of all the sales people and one of the sales people put up his hand and asked why are we rolling this out? What’s the point of all this? And I loved the VP of Sales’ answer: Because I want you selling, not doing paperwork.

That’s why automating expense management has an impact far beyond just saving time and money on processing. If you change something in your ERP system there are maybe 5 users that are impacted. Improve expense management and you improve the lives of a large number of people. You are multiplying the happiness

Getting ROI from automating expense management

Tony Darugar — Thu, 30 May 2013 14:52:43 -0400

Paystream Advisors has just published their annual Travel and Expense Benchmark report. This report surveys AP and Finance professionals at a wide range of companies on various aspects of their T&E management practices.

With the economy recovering, nearly two-thirds of companies report an increase in travel and expense spend. While the number of companies automating the T&E process continues to rise, still just 36% of companies surveyed reported using a fully automated and integrated system.

Since T&E is one of the largest single expenditures for most companies, it also presents one of the largest opportunities for savings so these benchmarks should be of interest to finance professionals in almost any company. Full disclosure: Coupa, along with other expense management software providers, helped underwrite the survey.

Two things really stood out for me in this year’s survey. First, the cost differences between automated and non-automated processing are pretty substantial, with manual systems costing almost three times as much as fully automated systems, as figure 13 from the report shows:

Fig. 13, Travel & Expense Benchmark Report from Paystream Advisors

The other thing that stood out is that the most common reason people cited for not implementing an automated expense management solution is that they feel the current process is working and that there won't be a return on investment.

This is pretty fascinating in light of figure 13, which shows that in fact it’s costing companies a fair bit of money to stick with a manual system. How much? Let’s do some math based on using a manual vs. a fully automated system:

Per expense report costs using automated solutions are about 1/3 of those for manual processing, presenting a big savings opportunity.

Clearly, there is some ROI to be had here. But that’s just one angle: direct processing costs. You also need to consider the indirect costs. These include:

Delayed expense reports. This can cause a ripple effect delaying budgeting, planning, reporting, cost accounting and closing the books.
Lack of visibility. When you don’t have visibility you’re not able to define intelligent policies. You can define some broadly but when it comes to what you are actually spending money you will not actually be able to define policies for specific categories or items.
Inability to negotiate discounts with vendors. For example, in a recent webinar we did with General Atlantic, they mentioned that a lot of their employees take black car services. By knowing that they were able to actually go in and negotiate with the vendor and get a preferred price which saves them quite a bit of money.
Employee satisfaction, or dissatisfaction. While I was writing this post, a friend shared with me that his company perpetually owes him $3500 due to delayed processing of expense reports. He goes to his boss and says I’d like to get my expense report paid and his boss says, ha, ha, I’d like to get mine paid too.

If you're among the roughly one-third of companies using a fully automated, integrated solution, congratulations! What are you doing with all the money you've saved? If you're among the roughly two-thirds that haven't automated yet, maybe it's time to reconsider how well your travel and expense management processes are really working.

Stumbling towards transparency

Rob Bernshteyn — Thu, 23 May 2013 14:27:17 -0400

In the past 30 days, Coupa did two things. The first one I’m not so proud of because it smacks of old school, outdated software business processes. The second one I’m very proud of, because I think it’s the future of the software business, or any business really. But let’s start with the first one.

In May, Coupa exhibited at SuiteWorld, NetSuite’s big user conference. Great. NetSuite is a partner of ours and together we’re working with some interesting brands to help them save money: Atlassian, Square, Blue Origin and Intermedia to name a few. No problem there—I’m proud of that.

The problem is, we sent out a press release, which I approved, that says we’re going to be at SuiteWorld. It says, in quotes: Coupa provides this type of stuff, and on the other side we have NetSuite saying, we have a common vision to help businesses save money.

Oh, I better hurry up and get a pass and go? Who cares? I don’t care, much less somebody else. It’s all wonderful, it’s all true, but if I’m a prospective customer, or an existing customer, I really don’t Companies need to embrace transparency to create authentic relationships with customers.care. Tell me about something Coupa and Netsuite have done together that’s delivered savings such that I should want to stop at that booth and see if it would work for me. That’s what’s missing for me.

What I’m struggling with is that a lot of us in software field follow norms set over decades and launch press releases announcing things that may or may not have anything to do with delivering real results. We’re all following so many processes—gotta get permission, gotta protect the brand, be careful what you say.

But what is it that people really care about if you dig underneath? They care about themselves. If we want to be heard, we should focus on real examples that are highly applicable to real people and get into that kind of dialog. This press release we sent out is not a conversation starter. This is nonsense from 1980. It’s a waste of time.

I think a lot of companies are held back because there’s no steak underneath the sizzle, and they’re scared of the transparency. They’re getting value out of the lack of transparency so they try to buffer it with PowerPoint and people and logos and press releases. They’re holding back from being exposed.

Forward thinking companies aren’t nervous about transparency. Or maybe they are nervous but they’re doing it anyway. They’re trying to make something happen, while other companies are trying to hold on to something.

Virgin America is a great example of a company that is not stuck to process. The whole airline industry is hyper-competitive and price driven, which makes it a great lens into what will happen in any industry as it gets more competitive. In the airline industry, if the price point for a particular flight is $499, you can go on any airline for that price. There’s no buffer there; there’s no fat. They’re all equal until someone does something different.

At Virgin America, they’re doing something different. They’re being more authentic, they’re being more real with everything. Take the whole food thing. Traditional airline, they have a schedule, they have a couple items, they go up and down, they block the aisle with the cart so you can’t go to the bathroom and they hand out this package with 11 peanuts in it whether you want it or not. Virgin America, you sit in your seat and look at a menu and order what you want from a touch screen and they bring it to each person when they want it, forget the cart.

The software industry still has a lot of fat, and it’s being held down by a handful of big players. These guys set up an industry where you show up with a big PowerPoint and you announce that you’re gonna do this and that, and the small companies are just channeling that, just going out and doing the same thing on a smaller scale.

It’s companies that are embracing this transparency that are going to have a chance to be successful. The challenge is that you have to expose more information about what’s really going on at accounts. If we could expose the fact that per employee operating expenses were $20,000 a year, and on our platform they went to $15,000 a year any company that’s similar ought to be interested in that.

Which brings me to the second thing we did this month, the one I’m really proud of: at the end of April, we published the Coupa Benchmark. The Benchmark is about transparency, both for procurement and for the software industry.

Part of the challenge we have in software with exposing the kind of information customers would really care about is getting it quantified to begin with. The Benchmark does that for key procurement and financial ops performance metrics across companies of different sizes and different industries. This is aggregated, sanitized data from real Coupa customers. Aggregated, so you don’t know what any one company is doing, and sanitized so you don’t know whose data it is and there’s nothing that could help you deduce that.

This is not one of these industry reports that are based on surveys and tabulated and everyone on Wall Street waits for it because it’s only published once a year. But don’t get stuck on the often. The problem with that kind of report that we’re used to is that’s a lagging indicator. It’s collecting someone’s data about something that already happened, then somebody called you, could I do a survey, then we assessed what they thought happened. It’s like a game of telephone, and by the time it’s published the world could have already changed. It’s all lagging indicators.

Our benchmarks are leading indicators. You can see what’s going on, right now. We can tell you, this is how much people on average are spending per night on hotels. We can tell you how long it takes to get things approved at different size companies. We can tell you how quickly processes are happening at companies as it pertains to spending money. This is valuable information you can use to optimize your processes.

We’ve published 6 of what we think are the most important benchmarks for procurement and finance peope, but we actually track over 50 benchmarks and our customers that have a subscription to that part of the platform can look at that data any time they want because it’s all there in real time on our cloud platform.

We’ve been gratified to see that hundreds of people have already downloaded the benchmark, so we think we’re on the right track providing information that really matters.

Press releases, trade shows, they’re not going to go away any time soon, and I’m not saying, cancel these distribution channels. I’m saying, let's change the content that flows through them. The drive toward greater market efficiencies is affecting every part of our way of life. Companies that embrace transparency and promote information efficiency, actually exposing real, actionable information instead of hiding behind corporate approved, non-information press releases are likely to be in a better position to build lasting, successful relationships with their customers and become big businesses to boot.

To get maximum value from software, look for strong partnerships

Rob Bernshteyn — Wed, 15 May 2013 14:00:11 -0400

In the software buying process, partnerships are often given scant consideration. Too often, buyers don’t learn about the quality of vendor partnerships until after the deal is done. Or, they make the technology choice and then pick the consultant separately.

That’s the wrong approach. Partnerships are like a marriage. You can’t just say, we’re gonna get the best deal on the software and we’re gonna get the consultant we happen to know, and marry them. That’s not how it works.

Partnerships should be very interesting to anybody who is deploying software because the truth is no one is a one-stop shop.

The most effective partnerships are usually based on having a lot in common.

Most software companies are good at technology. Then there are a whole bunch of consultants that bring the technology to their clients as a solution. There are ancillary products that need to snap onto the solution, and there are also systems integrators that implement the solution. In each of these cases, you need to judge the strength of the partnership, not each individual element.

The challenge the buyer often has with a weak partnership is that it can turn into a finger point.

The consultant says, well we did an analysis, we found where the gaps are and for that we’re charging you money. Their value-add is to analyze your business, show you technology variety and tell you, you gotta build some stuff. They benefit from there being a lot of confusion because they charge by the hour.

The technology provider says, hey my technology can do whatever you want and it’s these guys who are configuring it, they have no idea what they’re doing and they’re milking you for dollars. And who

3 dimensions of software usability: Relationships, relationships, relationships

Tony Wessels — Tue, 07 May 2013 08:59:06 -0400

Is your software hurting your relationships?

In the enterprise software market right now, everyone is talking about usability. But finding a solution that is truly easy to use is hard. If you look at the different people who use procurement software, or actually any software, the user interface, and the interaction between the employee and the software is what everyone typically talks about.

But the user interface is just a veneer. Real usability extends to the impact your software has on three key relationships: The relationship between administrators and IT, between administrators and users, and between your company and the companies and people it does business with. Software that is truly usable should complement, not complicate, these relationships.

Take the administrator/IT relationship. A good ease of use metric is, how much time do you need to spend with IT? Usually the way the software is built, it's easy for the front end. But from the administration standpoint, how easy is it to implement and configure? That's where everything starts falling apart.

"It's not you. It's your software."

Look at backend functionality. Things like sliders, drag and drop, and the ability to easily create or change web forms are hallmarks of administrative ease of use. It shouldn’t require a degree in engineering in order to configure the product. Anyone should be able to do it.

Look at the implementation time that it takes to get the software up and running, relative to the size of the deployment. That’s a huge clue as to how complicated the software is.

IT, for their part, has other priorities, probably related to core ERP and they can’t afford to be hanging out at your desk. So, the same ease and usability you have on the front end needs to be available from an administration standpoint. If you know your IT person really well, that’s probably a

Beyond RFPs: 3 keys to finding the best software vendor

Rob Bernshteyn — Thu, 02 May 2013 12:10:12 -0400

We all know how the software vendor selection process works. You do a needs analysis, call in some vendors, watch a bunch of PowerPoints, put out an RFP or an RFQ and compare and contrast. Or some version of that. It’s considered a valuable process, and a necessary one, and often the end result is you deploy the solution and then everyone celebrates. The vendor and the consultants got paid, but it’s entirely possible no meaningful business outcome was attained.

I talked in my last blog post about the ideal customer-vendor relationship, which I believe should be a partnership focused not on technology deployment but on tangible business outcomes that move your company forward. To achieve that kind of relationship, you need to look beyond line items on an RFP or RFQ at the type of approach the vendor takes to the market. Look for three must-have characteristics: A focus on the bigger picture, a minimal friction approach, and an orientation that favors people over process.

Look for a vendor with a collaborative approach.Focused on the bigger picture

First and foremost, you want a vendor that is focused on making their customers successful. They are not going to be focused on time and materials, or on how much money they make up front. They are going to be focused on getting you to a mutually agreed upon result.

That means both parties need to think bigger. You need to think, is this a comprehensive solution or is it a stopgap for a certain business function? The vendor should be thinking that way too, drilling down into your business to find out whether solving this one problem is going to do it for you.

There are plenty of people that create great stopgaps for individual business functions. There aren’t too many vendors that are thinking

The Coupa Benchmark: Putting your procurement performance in perspective

Ravi Thakur — Tue, 30 Apr 2013 15:03:30 -0400

If you are trying to figure out how to be successful with procurement and don’t know where to start, perhaps the best thing to do is take a look at your peers.

For example, think of someone in your field who is at the same point in their career that you are. That person is in your shoes, so exchanging ideas on career best practices can help each of you become more successful. That’s what The Coupa Benchmark report aims to do – let professionals learn from the collective performance of others.

Study the metrics in The Coupa Benchmark report and take what you learn back to your organization. Use the information to drive positive change. You might be blown away at the results you can achieve – faster PO approvals, shorter invoice payout times, and better pricing on products and services are just a few of the possibilities.

And the impact can go beyond your own department walls – you can potentially drive smarter spending across the entire company and add to the overall bottom line. Now that would make you a rock-star, wouldn’t it?

The data in the report was extrapolated from customer usage metrics on the Coupa cloud platform, which has tens of thousands of global users and 650,000 suppliers. The benchmark reports on spending across large (more than $1.5 billion), medium-sized ($250 million – $1.5 billion), and small (less than $250 million) company categories.

By the way, if you’re curious how Coupa is able to collect benchmark data in the first place, it’s

3 Keys to a Successful Enterprise Software Deployment

Rob Bernshteyn — Wed, 17 Apr 2013 17:09:00 -0400

I like to say that at Coupa, we don’t care about customer satisfaction, and we don’t. As a software vendor, there about are a million things we could check off a list to satisfy you—or never satisfy you. We’re not interested in that.

What we care about, and what we focus on with every deployment is customer success. There are three key areas we focus on: Metrics, adoption and speed. Any finance or procurement professional can use these guidelines for success with any kind of software deployment.

Metrics that matter

In a lot of software implementations, people focus on the wrong thing. They focus on automating some process, on making sure they get the right signoff and everything is technically sound, on having all the processes properly mapped. Then they wind up having a lot of arguments with their vendors—“you didn’t build this, you didn’t do that in time.” Eventually they go live and then it’s, “well what was the point of all that?” And it’s because they weren’t focused from the start on real metrics of outcome that matter for the project.

Instead of a vendor-to-customer kind of relationship like the one I’ve just described, the relationship should be a partnership focused on a business outcome. The business outcome could be a lot of

Bernshteyn: Get ready to be Inspired

Rob Bernshteyn — Thu, 04 Apr 2013 17:09:16 -0400

Next Monday, we welcome our customers, partners and employees to San Francisco for Coupa Inspire, our first ever user conference. I know I speak for everyone at Coupa when I say we are excited to have people from all three of these parts of the Coupa community together in one place.

We decided to call our conference Inspire because we’re hoping it will be a forum where we all come together to be inspired by one another. Inspire is not just about selling things to each other. It’s about getting aligned around how we can collectively work together to shape the future of this industry and this space with a focus on real, measurable customer success.

We all have an opportunity to make an impact helping companies optimize their spend by combining the technology that we have, and the expertise that our partners have with the collective knowledge and wisdom of our customers who work in this field every single day.

So far, I’ve been inspired by the turnout, by the number of forward-thinking customers that are coming, and the relatively large number that are presenting. I’ve been inspired by how open and willing they are to share their knowledge.

I’ve also been inspired by the support we’ve gotten from our partners in sponsoring and otherwise helping us put on this event. And, I’ve been inspired by the passion I’ve seen from our employees who have contributed their talent and energy to make this conference a success.

Coupa Inspire is an opportunity for conversation, for sharing best practices and the latest technology. We’re hoping to learn as much from our partners and customers as they do from us, to make Coupa better so we can continue to help you transform our industry. I look forward to seeing you there!

Bernshteyn Unplugged: An Open Conversation with Coupa’s CEO, Part 3 of 3

Tony Wessels — Wed, 03 Apr 2013 16:27:00 -0400

A while back, I sat down with Coupa CEO Rob Bernshteyn for an hour-long webinar, "Bernshteyn Unplugged". Rob and I chatted about Coupa, cloud computing, and the state of procurement today, and Rob fielded some tough questions from the audience. If you haven't gotten to know Rob yet, he's a great conversationalist and not shy about speaking his mind, so it's well worth a listen.

We're bringing you the "best of” commentary in a three-part series here on Making Cents. In Part 1, Rob shared his unique perspective on customer success. In Part 2, we talked about Coupa’s key market differentiators. In this last post, Rob holds forth on the value the cloud is bringing to procurement.

Tony: On the cloud topic, here's a question: How is Coupa any different than all the other companies out there saying they are cloud today? Because speaking as the marketing guy, it's an awesome marketing platform to be able to say we're cloud. But, the other 60 companies we talked about, well, they're all cloud too. It's easy to slap a sticker on that. So how is Coupa any different?

Rob: It's a great point and this is where it's very easy to differentiate Coupa. Everyone became a software-service-in-a-cloud company in the last three years by taking their existing products, and like you say, putting clouds on their website, and changing their pricing model and that's not really the what makes a company a cloud company.

Let me give you a very, very simple example from a technology perspective and then talk about it more broadly. Let's take Gmail, which is web-based email. Now what you're using there is one multi-tenant, scalable cloud platform. They're using one code line.

Now, everyone that uses Gmail is getting the value of all the innovations that Google's putting into it. They've created a new feature in Gmail recently where you can see the most recent people that you've emailed about on a topic and you just click the button and add them to your contacts. That's innovation in an area that hasn't seen innovation since email came out. And they are able to do that because they're on one cloud platform.

But at the same time, obviously I don't see anybody's email and their inbox and they don't see mine. So what we're all doing is leveraging this one code line that Google Gmail has created for us and getting the opportunity to have all the innovation they continue to push into that platform while at the same time being able to manage our own inboxes and outboxes securely and scalably.

That's the big difference with the cloud – platform scalability. You can continue to get more and more innovation and capabilities from the platform over time and you know it's going to be there to support you, versus just buying based on feature/function today and realizing a few years down the road that either the company gets tucked into some other organization or just isn't supporting that platform.

But more broadly than that, a true cloud business is a software-as-a-service business. It's a business that's built on one platform and everyone in the company is working to drive customers to success on that platform. And that's exactly what we're doing here at Coupa. It's seen symptomatically in every area of the business from the pricing model to the incentives on the marketing and sales team, to the incentives on the customer success team to drive adoption, to the incentives on the implementation team to drive deployment success and real measurable value. It's seen throughout the organization and it's a completely different business because of the cloud.

Coupa Inspire Keynote: New Procurement Ideas from Jason Busch, Part 2

Elena Anuzzi — Wed, 20 Mar 2013 11:05:00 -0400

Jason Busch of Spend Matters

We’re very excited to have Jason Busch of Spend Matters as one of our keynote speakers at Coupa Inspire, our first ever user conference which we’re holding April 8-10 in San Francisco. Jason has a lot on his mind and has been working away on his presentation about the top ten new ideas procurement leaders need to focus on to craft a procurement strategy that addresses finding new sources of savings and value, as well as risk avoidance. Last week in Making Cents we covered the first five, which included:

Becoming more elegant in strategy, structure and execution.
Finding new ways of fostering responsibility
Instilling a performance and metrics-driven culture
Developing “unorthodox” CFO and finance engagement techniques
Tackling predictive buying and decision guidance support

Here’s what else is on Jason’s mind:

Data enlightenment. It’s not enough to become data driven. How can procurement transition from information owner to knowledge and insight owner?
Organizational stewardship of ideas. Who better than procurement to take on the role of gathering, packaging and sharing information about supplier innovation, or disruptive new product segments forming in an emerging market?
Lassoing services spend. If you’ve heard Jason speak, you may have heard this before. He’ll talk about how the time may finally be right for procurement to finally step in and play a key role in managing spending in marketing, IT, professional services and other service spend categories.
Disarming IT organizations and CIOs (in more ways than one). As the firewall between internal stakeholders, systems, processes and the outside world, IT organizations are poised to effectively manage interrelated company processes and systems extending outside the four walls. Who better than procurement to take this lead and to truly disarm IT organizations, become a new partner to CIOs?
Moving beyond the cloud. The concept of platform is important. There is no centralized platform that organizations can build on to enable new types of transactional connectivity. How platforms relate to connectivity webs, networks and cloud applications themselves is a critical question to ponder.

We hope you can join us at Inspire for Jason’s talk and many other presentations by procurement leaders at top corporations. It’s sure to get you thinking about the evolution of procurement and how you can leverage new procurement technologies and best practices in your business.

Procurement Strategy: Narrow Your Focus to Create Value Beyond Savings

Kelly Barner — Wed, 13 Mar 2013 15:50:17 -0400

At Coupa, we are always interested in understanding Kelly Barnerchallenges that CFOs and CPOs face as they think about procurement strategy. We asked Kelly Barner of Buyers Meeting Point to share her thoughts about today's procurement challenges with our readers. Here they are:

It is hard to be in procurement today. We still (and always will) face the primary challenge of saving money, even as our companies reduce their total spend. In addition, there is a myriad of other initiatives we are expected to implement. This extensive list includes risk management, revenue generation, sustainability, diversity, supplier rationalization, transformation, talent management, category management, financial accountability and better alignment with corporate priorities.

Effective procurement strategy requires a balance of focus and communication.Unquestionably, some of these elements are touched upon in individual projects, but in order to put broad action plans in place we must prioritize our efforts, putting our weight behind the ones that present the greatest opportunity for the right results. All of the initiatives are presented as being of the utmost importance, and in reality, each one is the highest priority to someone in the organization. It is unrealistic to think we can handle them all simultaneously, and by not picking a few to focus on, we are unlikely to accomplish any of them.

There are two reasons we need to narrow our focus. The first is that all of the initiatives present opportunities to create value beyond savings; we want to reduce risk, increase diversity, or innovate with suppliers, e.g. The second reason is that by purposefully selecting a direction for procurement strategy, we leverage our expertise and emerge as leaders in the organization.

The place procurement holds in the executive hierarchy has been discussed at length and varies by company and industry. For any individual head of procurement to get their ‘seat at the table’ they need to have a vision that can be executed to the advantage of the whole company. Looking at the corporate strategy and elevating certain initiatives over others shows an understanding of the competitive landscape. It also presents colleagues in other parts of the company with a new perspective on procurement and our potential contributions.

To the point about other colleagues: it is impossible to prioritize one initiative without putting another on the back burner. The communication that takes place before and after plans are put in place should allow for collaboration with other leaders in the organization, but the final decision must lie with the head of procurement as part of the executive leadership team. Navigating stormy seas is not new to us. The skills we have acquired in sourcing projects will be well applied in establishing higher-level strategic plans.

It is hard to be in procurement today. But the level of challenge gives us an opportunity to flex our muscles and show what we are made of. If procurement strategy was easy, not only could anyone do it, it also wouldn’t present much of a career opportunity. Visibly leading execution of a focused procurement strategy allows us to make a greater contribution to the company and to put our expertise into practice.

What is your biggest procurement challenge? We'd love to hear from you.

Coupa Inspire Keynote: New Procurement Ideas from Jason Busch

Elena Anuzzi — Tue, 12 Mar 2013 11:05:53 -0400

Coupa INSPIRE, our first-ever user conference is April 8-10 in San Francisco. We're excited to have Jason Busch, founder and Executive Editor of Spend Matters as one of our keynote speakers. Jason has deep experience in the procurement space, both in helping launch new products and helping companies save money through strategic procurement and sourcing initiatives and is known as a thought leader in the field. In his talk, he'll share what's on his mind about the future of procurement, including how organizations can improve "procurement empathy", respect, adoption, results and elevation.

Here's some of what he'll cover:

Procurement elegance. Procurement elegance includes how organizations select and use tools, implement and execute programs/processes, and relate to and engage the rest of the organization.
Fostering Responsibility. Procurement has a big role to play here, and it extends far beyond basic controls and systems to an entire organizational approach to reducing business risk, improving diversity programs, corporate social responsibility (CSR) and many other areas. Jason will discuss both bottoms-up and top-down approaches to improving your culture or responsibility.
Instilling a Performance and Metrics-DrivenCulture. Jason will explore how to make not just benchmarks and KPIs more pervasive in procurement, but also the value of becoming more quantitative and analytical in general – and how this applies to setting priorities, problem solving and supplier/stakeholder engagement at many levels of the business.
“Unorthodox” CFO and Finance Engagement Techniques. Learn how to create greater sources of procurement value, from identified and realized savings to new types of working capital management approaches by engaging senior finance. Get practical tips for getting the attention of CFOs and rallying them behind the procurement cause.
PredictiveBuying and Decision Guidance. The concept behind this emerging area is to leverage intent of the user and to provide recommendations based on the outcomes they want to achieve. Such approaches can focus on basics such as providing guidance based on costs or general compliance, or more advanced approaches, such as delivering predictive risk and performance analytics.

But that's not all! He's also firming up discussions on the meaning of data enlightenment, disarming IT, lassoing services spend, stewardship and looking beyond the cloud at applications, networks and platforms. We'll have more from Jason around those topics later, but it's shaping up to be an interesting and provocative keynote, and one you won't want to miss.

Isn’t Software-as-a-Service Just Hosting of Enterprise Software Products?

Rob Bernshteyn — Fri, 08 Mar 2013 15:44:00 -0500

Software as a Service (SaaS) has gained a lot of traction--and a lot of buzz--as the cutting edge way to deliver enterprise software products. Cynics argue that behind the buzz is just a lot of repositioning, and that no matter what you call it--Applications Service Provider (ASP), On-Demand, Cloud or Software-as-a-Service—it basically boils down to an alternative way to host a software product. In this view of the world, Software as a Service benefits are confined to cost and efficiency.

While on the surface it might look that way, the truth is that Software as a Service companies are actually very different, especially the ones that get it right. True SaaS companies are not product companies at all. They are customer success creation companies that leverage their software capabilities to solve their customers’ problems.

Software product companies are organized around making the initial sale, and selling upgrades down the road. SaaS companies are organized around securing an ongoing revenue stream from subscriptions. For true SaaS businesses, benefits to the customer must be real, measurable and continual, or the subscription will not be renewed. This requires a completely different full company approach where customer success is the key organizational driver.

True SaaS companies look and feel different in virtually every department. Here’s how to spot a good one:

Department	Software as a Product	Software as a Service
Sales	Focused on features, functionality, customization	Focused on quantifiable business outcomes, time to value, and rapid adoption through simple user experience
Marketing	Drive to create awareness around product and features; death by PowerPoint	Centered on customer success stories, connecting prospects to reference customers and ready availability of supervised test drives
Alliances	Partners share warm referrals and leads with one another, yet remain focused in silos on their own businesses	Partners add value in the form of pre-integrated functionality or value added services that speed time to success for customers
Implementation	Professional services teams charge hourly rates; deployments are often open-ended; customer bears all the risk	Professional services teams are incented to get customers on the platform and hit key success metrics as quickly as possible
Product Management	Focus Groups, multi-year rigid roadmaps; customers conform to the vendor’s roadmap	Utilization of instant feedback and crowd-sourced prioritization to drive rapid feature development; balancing customer, market, and innovation driven agendas
Development	No across the board visibility into user habits	Driven by monitoring of real-time usage metrics across hundreds of customer deployments; if large numbers of users are getting stuck in the same place, it’s easy to see and fix
Customer Support	Seen as a cost center; incentivized to keep costs low. Not uncommon for it to be fully outsourced, offshored or to push customers to self-service options fully	Seen as an opportunity center; incentivized to leverage customer input to improve the offering; goal is to never get the same question or problem again

As you can see, Software as a Service benefits extend well beyond simply providing a more cost-effective hosting solution. Many enterprise software product companies have claimed to be SaaS, usually by offering to host their products at a data center and change their pricing model. Their DNA and approach is still likely to be that of a products company.

A company that is either built from the ground up or is very meticulously converted to be a SaaS company will understand and live by this committed focus on customer success. Maybe after all there is some logic behind the buzz, and some very good reasons why true SaaS companies are valued so highly by customers and the market.

Coupa Customer Spotlight: Q&A with Avalon Health Care Group

Elena — Fri, 01 Mar 2013 14:34:02 -0500

Avalon Health Care Group provides long-term care, skilled nursing, rehabilitation and memory care services in the Western United States. We spoke with Hyrum Kirton, Avalon’s Vice President Procurement about his company’s experience with Coupa.

Coupa: Tell us about Avalon, and why you needed a procurement solution.

Hyrum: Avalon deals in post acute or long-term care. It’s the task of most anybody in purchasing to try and have a handle on all of the spend that goes on in the organization. We had 60% of the spend that we had no control over. It was a wild spend. We didn’t want to hire a staff of people to process and do purchase orders in the traditional sense. We needed technology.

Coupa: What were some of your considerations in choosing a solution?

Hyrum: Before Coupa the users would look at their traditional profit and loss statement. That statement would tell them in the last month how you did. It’s hard to enact any real change when they're not able to make a better decision at the time of the purchase. Coupa allows that user to see that information at the right time, at the right place to make the right decision.

Coupa: How did Coupa fit the bill?

Hyrum: We needed a solution that would be more intuitive for them to learn, it would be comfortable for them to use and it would provide them the information they needed in a reliable way.

The Coupa solution has a native iPad and iPhone app as well as the ability to approve right from an email application even on a Blackberry. For our company, the ability for those business units to make the right purchase decision at the right time, at the right price for us that was very critical.

Coupa: How has being in the cloud benefitted Avalon?

Hyrum: The Cloud has been a really fit and that software as a service that we have been receiving from Coupa has been very valuable. We didn’t want to look at trying to manage all of the server space and all of the various aspects of the idiosyncrasies of the technology. We just really needed them to deliver this valuable service.

We don’t have to worry about what’s going on with the server. We don’t have to worry about upgrades. We don’t have to worry about all of those things that we really don’t have people on staff for so it probably saved us about 75% of the time it would have taken plus the expense that we didn’t have to incur as part of that Coupa model where implementation and all of that is kind of built into our subscription.

Coupa has shown to be a true best of breed and they’ve shown to be a true standout with the ease of use in their technology platform.

Coupa Customer Spotlight: Q&A with Armstrong

Elena — Fri, 22 Feb 2013 19:52:39 -0500

Armstrong World Industries is a leading manufacturer of flooring, ceilings and cabinets for residential and commercial construction. Coupa spoke with Jon Goss, Supply Chain Business Analyst about how Coupa helped Armstrong reduce the number of purchasing and procurement tools used and simplify its procurement process.

Coupa: What was the biggest problem you were trying to solve for in your procurement process?

Jon: The problem we definitely wanted to address is getting spend under management. We had probably upwards of 20 different tools to do this one task, and it got pretty complicated. And if one tool goes down, everything goes down. It wasn't really end-to-end. That's what really drew us to Coupa, was the procure-to-pay type of system.

Coupa: What advantages are you finding from using a cloud-based system?

Jon: For Coupa, it's just all in the cloud. It's all out there. I don't have to worry about finding anything. I can do it on my phone. I can do it on any kind of Wi-Fi., and I have access to it. We're approving everything off of BlackBerries, off of iPhones, and it's definitely a huge, huge benefit for our approvers.

Coupa: How has your procurement process changed since implementing Coupa?

Jon: Anybody can be an approver. We have buyers at every single plant around the world. The licensing is a lot cheaper than something we would have for SAP. So we can have more people in the system to use it. So it increases our visibility. Anyone can use it and we want everyone to use it. My day is Coupa!

Coupa Customer Spotlight: Q&A with Alta Devices

Elena — Wed, 13 Feb 2013 17:29:59 -0500

Alta Devices designs and manufactures the world’s thinnest and highest efficiency solar cells. Coupa caught up with Finance Director Alan Wong and Senior Buyer/Planner Robert Nadone to learn how Coupa has helped them keep the procurement process simple even as the company grows rapidly.

Coupa: Tell us a little bit about Alta Devices.

Robert: Alta Devices is a solar energy company. Renewable energy.

Alan: We are in the process of manufacturing solar cells and modules.

Robert: It is a technology that is trying to rival what is currently out there in the market.

Coupa: What was your purchasing process like before you implemented Coupa?

Alan: We started with a manual process. We would have to go and chase down signatures for purchases. So we had grown to a point where it was time for us to automate some of our processes. And I started looking around for solutions out there. I ran across Coupa one day, and the rest is history.

Coupa: What appealed to you about Coupa’s procurement solution?

Robert: My first impression of Coupa was that it seems like it's a flexible and user-friendly tool.

Coupa: Has that turned out to be true?

Alan: Some of the things I've heard from my Coupa users is that it's easy to use. It's easy to learn. It gets their work done faster.

Robert: With the complex systems, I've noticed there's a lot of navigating and toggling back and forth. With simple systems like Coupa, I find that it just seems to be pretty user-friendly. I can get in, get out, and do what I need to do.

Coupa: What is your purchasing process like now?

Alan: Since I've implemented Coupa, we've probably added 50 employees. I've not done a single bit of training. I actually direct them to http://training.coupa.com.

My day is easier with Coupa because I don't have people coming to my desk asking for signatures. I can just log in to Coupa, or I can check my phone and approve purchase requests on my own. It offers what I'm looking for. It makes me very happy.

Robert: I would buy Coupa again today.

What You Wanted To Know About Supplier Networks But Were Afraid to Ask

Jason Busch — Wed, 30 Jan 2013 12:40:08 -0500

Later today (at 12:00 PM CST), I’m participating in a Spend Matters webinar with Dell’s Kevin Turner titled: 3 Ways to Earn Loyalty and Profit from Your Suppliers: Lessons from Dell. It’s not too late to sign up. Click here for the background on what we’ll be featuring. And here’s a sneak peak at some of the points that I’ll be addressing during the discussion:

Networks aren’t like enterprise software or cloud apps today
One size does not fit all – apples-to-apples comparisons are hard
Networks can enable a step-change in on-boarding, transactional, management and sourcing efficiency or they can paper over smaller pain points
Suppliers perceive different value from networks based on their pricing, size, customer relationships, marketing goals, working capital needs, desire for transactional efficiency, etc.
Procurement and AP organizations can “lock” suppliers into networks and network fees based on eProcurement and e-invoicing software selections
Network marketing is often quite disingenuous

What else will we bring up? Join us to find out. As one of the largest suppliers on global supplier networks today, Dell won’t pull any punches. And Kevin Turner, participating on behalf of Dell, is a true expert in supplier network nuances, variations, overall business models and value propositions for buyers and suppliers alike.

Join us to get the true supplier perspective on networks – and to learn everything about supplier networks you wanted to know but were afraid to ask! Suppliers, procurement organizations and consultants can register here for today’s Spend Matters webinar with Dell.

Click here to register!

Wednesday, January 30: 12-1pm CST

(Can't attend the live event? Register anyway to receive access to the slides and recorded version)

Ask Dell: How Do Suppliers View Supplier Networks?

Jason Busch — Tue, 29 Jan 2013 11:41:13 -0500

This Wednesday, January 20^th at 12:00 PM CT, I’m participating in a Spend Matters webinar with Dell’s Kevin Turner titled 3 Ways to Earn Loyalty and Profit from Your Suppliers: Lessons from Dell.

On the live webinar, we’re having Dell provide a candid look at the sell-side of the procurement equation and what suppliers really think of supplier networks. Get your questions answered:

Network fees – what do suppliers think?
Can networks improve buyer/supplier relationships?
What is the real value equation for suppliers in network transactional efficiency?

Kevin Turner is the real expert on the call (I just play one on the Spend Matters Network). As Director of Global eCommerce Integrations for Dell, Kevin deals with over 50 procurement vendors serving thousands of customers. He knows what works for suppliers – and what doesn't. On the webinar, Kevin will share his perspectives with me and Coupa’s Ravi Thakur in a roundtable discussion of supplier enablement and best practices for building profitable supplier relationships.

We’ll explore a range of topics including how to become your suppliers' customer of choice and be their highest priority. And we’ll look at the pros and cons of supplier networks and how to decide what's best for you. The webinar will also explore tips for having suppliers add value and help you champion organizational change through network engagement.

We’ll be taking lots of audience questions as well in a new webinar format we’ll be trying out (just one slide from me!) Whether you work for a supplier, a procurement organization or a consultant advising either party on buyer/supplier network enablement and implementation join us tomorrow for a webinar you won’t want to miss.

Click here to register!

Wednesday, January 30: 12-1pm CST

(Can't attend the live event? Register anyway to receive access to the slides and recorded version)

Bernshteyn Unplugged: An Open Conversation with Coupa’s CEO, Part 2 of 3

Tony Wessels — Thu, 20 Dec 2012 17:27:31 -0500

Coupa’s Key Market Differentiators

A while back, I sat down with Coupa CEO Rob Bernshteyn for an hour-long webinar, "Bernshteyn Unplugged". Rob and I had a great conversation about Coupa, the cloud, and the state of procurement today, and Rob fielded some tough questions from the audience. If you haven't gotten to know Rob yet, he's a great conversationalist and not shy about speaking his mind, so it's well worth a listen.

We're bringing you the "best of” commentary in a three-part series here on Making Cents. In Part 1, Rob shared his unique perspective on customer success. In Part 3, we'll hear what value he sees in cloud-based procurement. Here, Rob talks about Coupa’s key market differentiators.

Tony: Why does Coupa stand out in the marketplace?

Rob: If I'm a prospective procurement leader, and I'm looking for a partner to help me not only play a strategic role in the company but to bring in the best-in-class technology solutions that drive value, I'd be thinking about these three things.

The first is the platform. Now, we are the only vendor in this marketplace — and I can say that very boldly and proudly — that has one true multi-tenant cloud platform supporting hundreds of customers around the world. This is very, very exciting for us. And the reason that we've had a lot of growth with our platform is that we took a very different approach to procurement.

Most of the vendors out there have built their companies by developing really great, really flexible features and functions for the back office. We did something 180 degrees from that. Rather than building back-office functionality and then exposing it via a self-service component, we built a platform starting with the end-user in mind.

From an analogy perspective, it's like the way Amazon built its capabilities versus Barnes and Noble, who built a website to supplement its brick-and-mortar shops. And by doing that, we were able to have a platform that ensures adoption, that ensures simplicity of purchasing, requisitioning workflow, approval, visibility to data, and visibility to analytics. That is a very, very different approach in the marketplace. No one else has taken that approach.

We've also built a very scalable, very extensible architecture. We have millions of transactions running through our platform daily. We're now managing tens of billions of spend dollars through our platform.

The second area of differentiation is our people. We have people that really care about you as procurement professionals. We really are passionate about this space. The emails that we pass around this company are about customers who say things like, ‘Wow! I used to know procurement as bureaucratic or something that was stopping me or slowing me down. Now, with this procurement capability we've rolled out, its actually sexy and intuitive and helping me do my job. It's helping me manage my spend in my department or in my particular location."

And the third area of differentiation is around process. And by process I really mean that we're a software-as-a-service company. We're not a company that's here to sell our customers a product that they need to figure out and dedicate a lot of employee/IT resources to.

So we’re just a very different company. We’re a company that has a scalable platform that's managing millions of transactions and billions of dollars of spend. We focus on customer success versus a focus on the old way of doing things — which is simply to sell customers software. These are the things that really differentiate us in the marketplace.

Bernshteyn Unplugged: An Open Conversation with Coupa’s CEO, Part 1 of 3

Tony Wessels — Fri, 14 Dec 2012 12:28:29 -0500

Why Customer Success Trumps Customer Satisfaction

Here on Making Cents we're bringing you the "best of” commentary from the webinar in a three part series. We open with Rob's perspective on customer success, followed in Part 2 by his thoughts on Coupa's market differentiators and in Part 3 by the value he believes cloud computing brings to the procurement space.

Tony: You often say that Coupa isn’t interested in satisfying its customers. Are you serious?

Rob: We say very clearly to our prospective customers that we're not interested in customer satisfaction. We're not interested in satisfying our customers because it's very, very difficult to satisfy a CPO or director of procurement because they have so much pressure on them from all the constituents around the company. If you try to satisfy everyone in the company, you are going to wind up with a very sloppy deployment and low adoption levels. You're not going to reach the goals that you have for the project.

We focus on customer success. The best deployments we've had are the ones where we’ve clearly articulated in the beginning “How will we measure success? Is there a certain level of adoption? Is there a certain impact to operating expenses? Is there a certain result set that can be mapped to profitability, actual shareholder value or uptick in stock price?” We will match the deployment against the objective. That's what keeps everybody focused.

And that's what has allowed us, in an industry where only 25-35% of software gets implemented, to our adoptions levels which are 95% plus. In fact, no customer has left us yet because of anything that we've done during a deployment. There are deployments that might take a little bit longer, but no one is leaving because they see that focus on the ultimate goal that procurement has — which is real business value.

Coupa Provides Relief From Chaos Of Superstorm Sandy

Tony Wessels — Fri, 09 Nov 2012 08:58:25 -0500

In the aftermath of Superstorm Sandy which ripped through the east coast tearing apart anything in its path, residents are trying to piece together their lives and return to some semblance of normal. Throughout this process, tales of heroism and the power of the human spirit are beginning to emerge.

At Coupa, like the rest of the world, we saw the massive storm on the radar, and instantly knew what that meant for our customers and their businesses. As Sandy was churning and swirling in the Atlantic, the Coupa Cloud Operations team was already huddled in all night sessions discussing fail-over strategies to ensure that there would be no major disruptions to the Coupa service. (There weren’t.) They do this often, that’s how we maintain continuous uptime.

Ravi Thakur, our V.P. of Customer Success, sent out an email prior to the storm notifying everyone of the measures being taken.

“Most of you know there is a massive storm that is about to hit the East Coast of the U.S. Over the weekend, our operations team has been working hard to be proactive about the possibility of the entire Virginia AWS region coming off line. We are doing what is required to ensure we continue to deliver the service to our clients in the time of need. Many of our customers have emergency procedures in place for disasters and those plans require access to Coupa to order products and services to help deal with the aftermath of a disaster. It's important that the service they rely on - continues to be up.”

And the storm hit the east coast with a vengeance. The focus of any natural disaster needs to be on maximizing the safety of human lives. It’s also imperative that business continuity be maintained to aid in the recovery process and get business up and running. While the wind and rain ripped through the city streets and flooded subways, our customers were comforted with the fact that their critical business assets (contracts, financial information) were resting safely in the Coupa Cloud.

An email went around Coupa last week about one such customer. Their offices were under five feet of water. Including their servers. Here’s the email from someone in our operations team. The names have been changed to protect the privacy of our customer:

“I just got a call from our customer, IT Director at a company in New York - their building is under five feet of water and all systems (including email) are down. The customer called me from his cell to ask if I could send him his Coupa link to his personal email address - the reason......they have all of their contracts stored in Coupa. They need to access those contracts to get in touch with their vendors and to initiate emergency protocols with suppliers. He said if it weren't for Coupa - they would be in even worse shape.

He was on his way to a neighbor's house (one that still has power) so he could get online and get what he needed from Coupa.

Thank you to our operations team for all of the hard work and dedication to making us such a solid true cloud solution - I could hear in in our customer’s voice how grateful he was to have access to something when all of their other systems are down. I know it doesn't make the devastation any less impactful - but it was great to be able to provide him with this one bit of stability and normalcy.”

Our thoughts and prayers are with those piecing together their lives after Superstorm Sandy and the subsequent storms that continue to hit the east coast. We have many employees in that region who have reported in safe and sound. Many of us at Coupa have donated to the relief efforts and have provided funds to the Red Cross.

Who is the Fastest Growing P2P or eProcurement Vendor in the Market?

Jason Busch — Tue, 06 Nov 2012 07:32:37 -0500

Jason Busch, an industry analyst and the founder of Spend Matters, shares his thoughts about Coupa's past, present, and future. Coupa's team is humbled and excited by his words. Here is the core of Jason's write-up.

Read the full article here.

3 Essential Time Saving Tools for a Chief Procurement Officer

Tony Wessels — Wed, 17 Oct 2012 09:28:36 -0400

Time is of an essence when you are holding the strings to your company's procurement purse.

Whether you are a Chief Procurement Officer or a CFO, having the right tools at your

fingertips saves time and propels your tasks to completion.

We've aggregated 3 tools to add to your procurement toolbox (Fill out a short form to download):

Personalized ROI Calculator - Get an in-depth review of your procurement goals and objectives with a personalized report summarizing potential ROI and savings in nine procurement impact areas.

RFI/RFP Template: Cloud Spend Management - This template contains over 400 line items for creating an RFP to evaluate and select procurement and expense management software.

Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) Calculator - This Paystream Advisors paper documents a method for calculating and comparing 3-year TCO for cloud-based vs on-premise spend management solutions.

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When Suppliers Compete, You Win

Kelly Deacon - Intesource — Thu, 11 Oct 2012 09:23:34 -0400

By Kelly Deacon – Intesource

Not every company has the purchasing power of a Fortune 1000 company. Many act like they do, though, when they continuously pressure suppliers for lower costs and more favorable terms.

The problem: It’s bad business.

Harsh, margin-busting negotiations can create volatile and animosity-filled supplier relationships. Since suppliers play an integral role in a company’s reputation today - from product quality and sustainability to labor practices – these practices put a company at risk. And at the end of the day, buying organizations can still only guess whether they’re getting the best possible value.

Fortunately, there’s a better approach to negotiation; Lending Tree’s slogan says it best: “When banks compete, you win.” The same is true in the supply chain – when suppliers compete, you win.

That’s the beauty of e-Sourcing. Instead of back and forth negotiations with suppliers, sourcing teams can tell a collection of qualified suppliers exactly what they need and let the suppliers compete against each other. There’s no need to haggle; if a supplier wants your business, they will put their best offer forward.

By removing yourself from the negotiation and putting the supplier in control, supplier relationships are strengthened. The process is much easier, on the buying organization, and is almost guaranteed to save a huge amount of time and money.

Spend Approval Silos Driving Maverick Spend

Mark Verbeck, Coupa CFO — Wed, 26 Sep 2012 08:27:22 -0400

Last week I participated in a web conference on spend management hosted by CFO magazine. A survey question during the webinar asked the CFO-centric attendees what they thought were their greatest challenges in spend management. Procurement people might be surprised by the limited amount of concern the audience had about off contract (“maverick”) spending. They ranked it 4th - well behind lack of visibility, complicated approval processes, and lack of user adoption. This is in stark contrast to what we at Coupa typically hear from CPOs.

Full disclosure - I used to be unconcerned by maverick spend, so I was not surprised by the result. My CFO counterparts and I typically believe that the finance organization has control of spend whether it is coming through procurement, invoicing, or expense reports. Unfortunately the amount of control, the ability to realize savings and the processing cost vary greatly between these approaches.

When I implemented a spend approval process that required a similar amount of scrutiny for invoices that are not backed by purchase orders as I would demand for the PO process itself, I realized how much these differences in approaches are often driving maverick spending -- taking away savings opportunities from the organization.

The CPO cringes when they hear someone say “just expense it” because they know there is likely to be a missed savings opportunity. Why is this phrase something that most people recognize? It’s because the alternative way to spend money is often cumbersome, hard to use, difficult to access and limited in scope.

We have seen some organizations try to address the challenges of the silos by fiat – “no invoices without a PO” and “No purchases of goods will be reimbursed on an expense report.” While these approaches might lead to better spend results and eliminate maverick spending, they also come at a significant productivity and processing cost.

Coupa has a better way. Manage all of your silos of spend as a cohesive unit, optimizing processing and efficiency, while capturing the maximum amount of savings.

Coupa 8: The next chapter in innovation for the buyer - part II (Smarter Contracts)

Bhaskar Deka — Mon, 10 Sep 2012 22:45:21 -0400

Continuing on the series on Coupa 8, in this post, I will talk about Coupa Smarter Contracts - one of the new modules in Coupa 8.

Purchasing contracts are one of your most important tools for cost-effectively conducting business with your suppliers. You negotiate the terms carefully - now make sure you’re getting the most out of them! For most organizations, however, finding the contract when you need it is a key challenge. Purchasing contracts tend to be all over the place. Some could be in Theresa's thumb drive, some in Lee's laptop, some in Dale's desktop, and still others neatly tucked away in Mohan's Manila folders. If you are not able to find the contracts, how do you ensure that the contract terms are properly enforced at the point of purchase?

Meet Coupa Smarter Contracts.

Money Might Not Grow on Trees but it does Fly in the Clouds

Henry Ijams, Managing Director, PayStream Advisors — Thu, 30 Aug 2012 15:09:57 -0400

How much can your company save by utilizing cloud based procurement solutions?

I recently presented a Coupa webinar focusing on calculating the total cost of ownership (TCO) for cloud-based applications. While cloud computing has been around for a while, there seems to be some confusion surrounding exactly what cloud computing is and how companies can benefit from applying it.

Most of the challenge stems from evaluating different cost elements of cloud solutions and comparing costs to traditional software deployment. Until the internet age, technology was always delivered using on-premise licensed solutions. What differentiates the cloud from traditional deployment is who manages and delivers the solution. In today’s Cloud, a third party vendor manages not only the application, but the deployment and the hardware.

If your procurement applications are on-premise, your company manages everything from the application to the hardware, software and upgrades. As you know, this can be a big investment in IT time along with commitment of capital. On the opposite end of the spectrum with cloud-based solutions, the vendor manages everything, allowing your company to focus on the core business of making the software deliver business value. Somewhere in between traditional in-house and cloud based solutions lie hosted services where your company and your vendor share responsibilities.

Graphic: The Transition of Enterprise Software to the Cloud

The benefits of cloud computing are widely promoted and include the ability to have access to the most current services, improved configurability, reduced costs and access to new services and applications that are constantly updated. The Cloud provider is willing to offer a much lower upfront cost with confidence that they will continue to win your business by continually improving the application.

In order to see the true cost and payoff of on-premise versus cloud-based solutions, buyers must carefully evaluate the immediate and long term costs of acquiring and maintaining the technology. This includes identifying the cost drivers for procurement automation – both the on-premise costs and the cloud costs. These costs include:

Software
Hardware and Infrastructure
Management of the supplier network
Configuration and Implementation
Data Migration
User Training
Annual Maintenance

Easy to Use TCO Tool

In an effort to simplify the process of evaluating on-premise versus cloud based solution costs, PayStream Advisors analysts developed an easy to use self-evaluation tool. The PayStream TCO calculation tool creates a Cumulative Cost Table that will automatically populate your cost data and graph on-premise vs. cloud development costs.

The TCO Calculation Tool makes it easy to determine which solution – cloud versus on-premise is more cost effective for your company. The tool is designed to help you understand your costs and gain the executive buy in you need.

Formula for Success

The attractiveness of Cloud-based solutions is undeniable; however, without a detailed comparison of the costs, projects can’t get started. Once you have the figures, the next step is to develop a plan of attack to obtaining executive sponsorship. PayStream has worked with innovative companies from around the world to develop successful project launches. In our 12 years of advising clients we’ve identified five key success factors worth sharing:

Develop a compelling vision
Utilize the TCO Calculation Tool to realistically calculate your costs
Build a bullet-proof business case
Build a realistic roadmap
Have a risk mitigation plan

If you missed the PayStream Total Cost of Ownership for Spend Optimization webinar, you can still tune in to learn more about how to calculate your TCO for cloud-based applications. It will be posted soon.

Coupa 8: The Next Chapter in Innovation for the Buyer

Bhaskar Deka — Tue, 28 Aug 2012 00:34:30 -0400

From the very formative days, Coupa has always been about innovation for the buyer. Continuing on that tradition, today, we are announcing Coupa 8 - the most innovative platform in the spend optimization world that takes "user-centricity" to a level never seen before!

When we first burst into the scene six years ago, the e-procurement space was badly in need of innovation. Some vendors were trying to put so called "self service apps" in front of complex back-end processes. Some were (unfortunately still are) trying to re-purpose '90s UI technology to claim victory on usability. Still others were embarking on a journey to "cloudify" on-premise software through clever marketing.

Coupa disrupted the market by focussing on users first as a means to bringing spend under management.

Buyers took notice.

Being chosen by Coca-Cola, the #1 brand in the world, is just one of the testaments to the unique appeal of a potent combination of unmatched usability, superior spend visibility, and rapid time-to-value of the Coupa cloud platform. Over the years, we have heard customers talk about us being the "gold standard" for user adoption of enterprise application. After all, we consistently see customers talk about more than 90% user adoption.

We are both humbled and hugely motivated to do more by such monikers.

When we set out to do Coupa 8 and listened to our customers, we realized that we have been fortunate to help our customers manage indirect spend in the procurement and expenses space by an order of magnitude. At the same time, we also heard about many areas that were ripe for innovation. With that in mind, we are announcing two new modules in Coupa 8 - Coupa Invoicing and Coupa Smarter Contracts. Coupa 8 makes it even easier to manage your spend - for folks in Accounts Payable (using our new Invoicing module); Contract managers (Smarter Contracts brings contracts to life!), road warriors (an iPhone app for expense reports), and well, just about everyone (over 30 major enhancements to the Coupa Procure to Order platform).

Some of our fellow travelers in the spend management space have taken the easy route of acquiring another company to extend their offering. May Lord have mercy on the poor souls in engineering who will try to "integrate" those solutions (aka apples and oranges and duct-tapes - e.g., trying to make an '90s application written in java to talk nicely to an another '90s application written in .net).

Here at Coupa, we continue to be innovators! Coupa 8 is based on the same unified and organically built platform trusted by customers around the globe who pump billions of dollars of spend through us.

Stay tuned for more on the new modules in the coming days.

Attaining the “State of Spend Optimization”

Constantine Limberakis — Thu, 16 Aug 2012 21:37:39 -0400

This week's guest post is courtesy of Constantine Limberakis, Senior Research Analyst, Aberdeen Group.

During the course of my career I recall often using the term “spend management” throughout the nineties. The concept of spend management is one that evolved from a technology perspective when it was realized that purchasing as an organization required a separate yet unique set of tools that could set it apart for improving efficiency and gaining deeper insight into spend – hence the birth of “eProcurement”.

But just like anything idea or concept there is a necessary evolution or reinterpretation where the concept needs to be reconsidered in a new light.

Just think about architectural developments like the classical to neo-classical, gothic and neo-gothic, etc. Perhaps better still would be the analogy of how impressionism violated the rules of academic painting. I experienced this sense of an “aha” moment as a result of a recent piece that I put together. The goal of the paper was to understand what defines spend optimization – in other words is there a trend emerging in procurement that is pushing toward a new idea beyond just managing spend?

I also shared this concept further yesterday on a webinar with Tony Wessels, VP of Marketing at Coupa entitled – In Search of Spend Optimization. Based on the respective experiences with their client base and the conversations I’ve had with end-users and vendors respectively, it is interesting to see how this concept evolves.

While this concept may still be a work in progress, I found several key features that can helped me construct what organizations must do to reach that higher point of “spend nirvana”. From this Analyst Insight “Creating a Culture of Spend Optimization“, I think it is apparent that to get noticed as an agent of change in their own rite, CPOs must find a way to transform an organization’s DNA and cultural mindset on a number of different levels. At some level I came to the following conclusions on how CPOs can attain spend optimization, I shared the following tactics that CPOs or other procurement leaders should pursue for attaining a level of spend optimization -

Be profit-center minded. Procurement organizations needs to promote the notion that procurement is a value-add to the organization and profit center oriented. For instance, procurement leadership should develop a “what if” scenarios report that can demonstrate procurement’s impact on net income and illustrate how it would have been lower without procurement’s involvement.
Be always on the mind of the executive. Executives need to buy into procurement’s vision of success. This provides two functions; 1. It allows these executives to communicate procurement’s value to their teams and 2. Procurement’s vision of spend optimization is more visible at the executive level.
Be talent oriented and focused. Procurement must do a better job at recruiting and marketing the best talent. While traditionally procurement may have been seen as a stepping stone to another function in the past, today procurement is increasingly becoming a desired function by its impact on the commercial viability of an organization.
Be organized through a center-led approach. Structural deficits in the way procurement has traditionally been organized has often impeded and effort that could create a common culture for understanding its value. Focus should be made on establishing a center-led model based on the ability to promote consistent policy while instilling flexibility of some self-determination at the local level.
Be innovative through technology. While organizations too often rely on technology as the panacea to solve organizational issues, technology is the necessary glue that can help centralize procurement processes and close the loop for gaining visibility, increasing spend efficiency and amplifying spend power within the organization through new technologies like mobility.

To better understand it, I would also encourage you take the CPO Agenda survey. The data collected from the survey will be in the report that will be released October 1^st entitled – The Chief Procurement Officer: Enterprise Champions during Economic Uncertainty.