Coupa Gets New UI, and Guarantees Results

I’ve written before about Coupa, a provider of a SaaS product for controlling and streamlining purchase and expense management. When I first reviewed the product I had questions around the viability of a third party product offering these services – the way I saw it this was pretty much core ERP functionality and I questioned how many organizations would want a third party solutions for this.

Possibly in answer to these sorts of concerns, Coupa is rolling out a new version of the product that has been designed to allow employees to spend less time within the application itself. Some specific things to aid in this include a to do notification page and inline editing on the checkout page. However what piqued my interest more was the new ability for Coupa users to review, approve, reject and comment on requisitions and invoices directly through email. It also includes mobile functionality.

This new version also adds to the benefits driven by the relationship that Coupa have with Boomi, this relationship sees Coupa integrated with a bunch of ERP solutions including Microsoft, Oracle, SAP and NetSuite.

More information about the new UI can be seen in the video below.

The thrust of what Coupa is doing it to consolidate procurement and expense management into a single solution for management and control. Again I’d like to really get a handle on where the value points are here – and have a feel for how deeply Coupa is integrated with ERP systems using the Boomi tools.

In terms of proof points about value, Coupa is introducing a novel scheme whereby they are guaranteeing a minimum 1% reduction in OpEx within six months or the service comes free. These schemes tend to be little more than marketing campaigns but it’s interesting to note that Coupa is actually offering to set down with customer’s financial teams to work on an OpEx reduction plan – a nice service backing to their product offering. Coupa is also calling out some customer success stories including;

• A Cloud CRM Leader who saw a 2.86% reduction in OpEx
• The Largest Rent-to-Own Retailer who reduced OpEx by 1.17%
• The Fastest Growing Regional Bank who enjoyed a 4.54% reduction
• etc etc

Again this is little more than bluster without seeing real metrics and methodologies. While I absolutely buy into the theory that expense and procurement management solutions can have a beneficial impact on organizations – in the same way that we saw some hard metrics at NetSuite’s Hairball wards to back up their claims of improvements, so too would I like to see Coupa come out with some customer success stories.