Coupa’s Latest Innovations Enable Business Resilience Amid Economic Uncertainty

By AIT News Desk On Jul 27, 2020

New capabilities provide businesses with increased spend control, risk mitigation, and agility to navigate this crisis with confidence

Today, Coupa Software, a leader in Business Spend Management (BSM), announced its latest product innovations that extend its cloud-based platform to give customers increased spend visibility, help mitigate supply chain risk, and increase business agility to adapt to change. Amid global economic uncertainty, Coupa’s latest enhancements leverage the power of the customer community and enable businesses to be more resilient during these times and ultimately spend smarter.

“With so much unpredictability in the world, companies are being challenged to quickly respond to and navigate through the fallout from COVID-19,” said Raja Hammoud, executive vice president of products at Coupa. “More than ever, these businesses need real-time visibility into their spend, the ability to mitigate their supply chain risk and cautiously manage their cash flow. We’re excited to provide our BSM community with the new capabilities to help them adapt to the current times and spend smarter every day.”

Increase Spend Visibility and Cost Containment

Finance and procurement teams need to make quick decisions about where to cut costs and shift spend in order to protect their business. This requires real-time visibility and complete control of spend across the entire organization. Coupa’s BSM platform unifies all business spend – from sourcing to contracts and invoicing to payments. The newest capabilities enable teams to act decisively and with confidence.

Big Data Powered Prescriptions: Leveraging data from the Coupa community, prescriptions are now ranked based on the total estimated impact that actions will have on the business. This feature makes it easier for teams to know what actions to take to reduce costs and increase team efficiency.
Automated Spend Controls: New capabilities and controls automatically block purchases that exceed negotiated contract value and allow for the instant pausing of contracts, invoices, orders, payments, and supplier information request forms.
Democratized Shipment Tracking: Coupa now gives small and medium suppliers the ability to provide buyers with the same level of shipment tracking that larger businesses have historically provided. Coupa integrates with more than 15 carriers, including UPS, FedEx, USPS, and DHL to give end users visibility into the shipping status of orders, including expected delivery date and detailed shipment history.

Mitigate Supply Chain Risk

In order to minimize supply chain disruptions, businesses need to monitor supplier health and identify emerging risks or potential delays. To help achieve this, Coupa added several new features to automatically augment risk monitoring and mitigation.

Continuous Supplier Performance Monitoring: New capabilities are continuously collecting employee feedback as spend and contract transactions occur to identify and alert customers of inherent and residual risk in the supply chain.
Prevent Sourcing & Payment Fraud: Coupa Spend Guard further leverages the power of the Coupa community to detect suspicious spend in real time across sourcing, purchasing (including supplier collusion), payment currency deviations, invoicing, and more.
Unified Risk Processes: Customers can now start supplier risk assessments, such as Pandemic Related, InfoSec, and GDPR directly from the sourcing event process, increasing synergies across sourcing and risk teams.

Build Agility as Change Arises

Now more than ever, businesses need to be prepared to pivot priorities and work processes to adapt quickly to change.

Greater Payment Flexibility: Coupa Pay has expanded capabilities across the B2B payment continuum to include options such as early payment discounts, payment authorization authority, batch payments, virtual card payment delivery via cXML, as well as guided bank account creation to give businesses and their suppliers even more payment flexibility.
Unified Spend Views: Coupa has consolidated goods and services spend, including work orders and contingent labor, to enable informed decisions on overall spend and contingent workforce. This visibility gives customers the agility to add temporary workers at the right time and avoid disruptions through tenure limit notifications – a key lever companies use to protect their business.
Centralized Categories: With centralized dashboards, companies can take immediate action based on key category insights and prescriptions presented, while embedded project management enables streamlined tracking of tasks.

“Now is the time for companies to get all their spend managed through one Business Spend Management platform,” said Mickey North Rizza, program vice president at IDC. “Having complete visibility of spend will give financial leaders the ability to recognize unrealized savings, potential fraud, and opportunities for increased spend efficiency so they weather volatile market conditions, even during the most challenging times.”