Coupa Announces New Product Innovations for the BSM Community to Spend Smarter Together

Company Continues to Set the Innovation Agenda by Harnessing the Power of the Community, Enhancing the User Experience, and Extending Its Open Platform Vision

At its annual Inspire’19 conference in London, Coupa Software, a leader in Business Spend Management (BSM), announced new product innovations that extend the capabilities of its cloud-based platform for businesses to manage all their spend in one place. Amid global economic uncertainty, Coupa’s latest innovations empower businesses with the visibility, control, and agility to spend smarter together.

“Now more than ever, businesses need a comprehensive platform to effectively manage all of their business spend so they can respond swiftly and smartly to any competitive or economic pressure,” said Raja Hammoud, executive vice president of products at Coupa. “The innovations that we announced today – conceived with and by the BSM community – are designed to help businesses learn, share, and collaborate, and get the spend control they need to thrive at all times.”

Harnessing ‘Community’ for Smarter Spending

Since its beginning, Coupa uniquely recognized the power of ‘community’ to help companies uncover new ways to strategically manage their spend. Purpose-built, the Coupa BSM Platform brings together a global community of businesses to collaborate with one another, and to leverage prescriptive insights from more than $1.3 trillion in cumulative business spend.

• Source Together, Coupa’s newest offering, delivers community-powered savings by connecting businesses with similar buying needs so they can source products and services as a group. Source Together, offered through the Coupa BSM Platform, brings companies together to leverage their collective buying power and help deliver greater savings from suppliers for commodities or services across geographies.
• The latest innovation from Coupa Supplier Insights draws upon Coupa’s aggregated and anonymous spend data from a global community of businesses to automatically tag suppliers that meet diversity requirements, such as those that are women-, minority-, or veteran-owned within their Coupa experience. Supplier Insights helps relieve sourcing teams of the arduous task of manually identifying diverse suppliers to more quickly align to their broader corporate social responsibility goals.

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Enhancing the User Experience in a Comprehensive Platform

The foundation of spending smarter is a comprehensive, user-centric platform that makes it easier for everyone in an organization to manage all aspects of business spend, from source to settle. This means delivering a unified, consumerlike experience across all areas of spend that enables employees to rapidly adopt and obtain value from new capabilities offered on the Coupa BSM Platform, such as advanced contract lifecycle management and payments, without the feeling of learning a new application.

• Within six months of Coupa’s acquisition of contract lifecycle management solution Exari, the company has rapidly unified the technology – now called Coupa Contract Lifecycle Management Advanced – with its BSM platform. With CLM Advanced, businesses have a streamlined yet powerful way to manage the contract lifecycle and operationalize contracts against spend transactions at scale, to turn negotiations into real savings.
• Coupa Pay for Expense Payments is the newest solution from the company’s payments offering. With Coupa Pay for Expense Payments, companies can reimburse employee expenses directly from within the Coupa BSM Platform. Focused on simplifying the fragmented payments space for businesses, Expense Payments creates a one-stop shop for businesses to manage the end-to-end expense process, reducing the complexity of managing multiple and manual systems while making the interface simpler for employees. Expense Payments is currently available in an early access program.

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Extending its Open Platform Vision

With the breadth of processes and systems involved, ranging from multiple ERPs to risk data, and more, effectively managing spend requires an open platform that can quickly and easily connect to and unify these disparate systems into a streamlined spend management process. Coupa’s open platform makes it simpler, faster, and more agile to connect to an ecosystem of market-leading technology partners to give businesses a single, unified destination to comprehensively manage spend.

• Following the launch of the Coupa App Directory in June, Coupa now allows companies to access third-party applications and data within the context of their BSM processesto empower businesses to make more informed spend decisions. The company’s newest alliances include Amadeus, which provides businesses and its travelers with an end-to-end travel booking experience via its flagship online booking tool, cytric Travel. With cytric Travel data embedded within the Coupa BSM Platform, travelers now have a single place to view and manage all of their business travel – from travel pre-approvals and bookings to expense reimbursements. In addition, EcoVadis provides supplier sustainability ratings, Mastercard Track provides supplier risk data, and BitSight provides supplier cybersecurity ratings.

“We are pleased to partner with Coupa to provide companies a simpler way to manage their corporate travel and expenses,” said Vasken Tokatlian, head of partnerships and alliances, corporations, travel channels at Amadeus. “Our joint customers now have a streamlined, consumerlike experience to manage travel and expenses all in one platform, enabling them to maximize the value of every dollar spent. Amadeus is committed to power smarter business travel for corporations and travelers around the world and this partnership with Coupa is a testament to our vision.”

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