PixabayI attended Coupa’s annual Inspire conference this year and was excited to finally attend a large event rather than just small meetings with clients and colleagues. The event had a palpable buzz to it and I hosted a panel with the CPOs from Disney, Engie, Staples and Casey’s that was well attended — as was the overall conference itself where attendees were clearly excited to be spending time with fellow humans again after two years of a pandemic. I, and other members of the Spend Matters analyst team, spent the event at a tech analyst session, but we also made sure to spend time with customers, partners and Coupa senior management. The consensus was cautious optimism about the pivot to a broader platform and ecosystem approach (including the unique community intelligence aspect of Coupa’s solution strategy) that includes the rapidly expanding Coupa App Marketplace.
One of my goals at the event was to better assess the firm’s progress in managing supply chain spending more deeply beyond direct P2P transactional support (even if its current customer penetration in direct is undoubtedly low relative to indirect spend) and its strong e-sourcing support for complex bidding events (e.g., for transportation sourcing and direct materials sourcing). Coupa’s current “sweet suite” spot relates to P2P support of indirect spend via its core Business Spend Management (BSM) application suite, but the firm has been morphing towards the supply management side of the house (e.g., modeling and management of the n-tier inbound value chain to do things like cost-to-serve analysis or supply risk analytics). For more on transcending spend management to supply [chain] management, especially in volatile supply conditions, read this. To wit, “spend is what you pay and supply is what you get,” and Coupa has certainly made a strong leap in getting more supply-capable with its newest set of capabilities acquired from LLamasoft (see our coverage “Coupa acquisition: A functional overview of LLamasoft’s supply chain design offering and its intersections with procurement solutions,” “Defining and exploring the overlap between direct procurement and supply chain” and “Exploring procurement, finance and supply chain use cases for today and tomorrow”).
But, is such a leap truly synergistic?
After the LLamasoft acquisition, we highlighted seven areas (condensed for brevity) where there seemed to be some natural synergies with Coupa’s current BSM application suite:
- Cost/spend forecasting
- S&OP-driven supply planning for raw materials
- Collaborating supply plans/POs with suppliers
- Determining inventory min/max, reorder points, and recommended PO quantity
- Generating network-level sourcing scenarios using network optimization
- Fleshing out product/part analytics
- Calculating value-at-risk
Here, we address them individually in “7 synergy areas of SCM with Coupa’s BSM …”
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