For the past 10 years, Coupa has focused on what it calls “Value-as-a-Service,” which has taken the form of a desire to drive value for its customers. This focus was carried through the second day of Coupa Inspire 2016 last week, when Raja Hammoud, vice president of product marketing and management, started the day by announcing five new product releases: Coupa Release 15, coming less than a year after Release 14; the new Contract Collaboration module, the early access program of InvoiceSmash, a travel and expense management product called Booking Freedom, and a services procurement module called Services Maestro. Each of these solutions is designed to extend the capabilities of Coupa’s portfolio and allow users to drive value throughout the entire enterprise spend management ecosystem.
Contract Collaboration
Hammoud hearkened back to Inspire 2015 where a user-driven advisory board helped Coupa leaders understand users’ frustration with contract management technologies. Although they valued the redlining and version control features available in Word, and tried to use them within existing technologies, many reverted to Word because they were not user-friendly.
In response, Coupa developers reconsidered contract management technology as a whole. “We’re in a new digital age – we have digital collaboration,” said Hammoud. “We knew that the solution has to be about embedding and weaving digital collaboration components as aspects of the total source-to-pay workflow.” Thus, Coupa officials did two things. First, they returned to the drawing board to determine what the ideal contract management solution should look like and how to develop it. Second, they researched the technology market to see if any like-minded companies had already developed a digital, collaborative solution that could meet today’s contract management needs and that could be incorporated into Coupa’s platform.
According to Hammoud, they struck gold with Contractually, a contract management solution provider located in Vancouver, Canada that “sounded” like Coupa in how they described the problem, and even coded their software on the same Ruby on Rails framework (click here to read about the Coupa-Contractually acquisition in the February 4, 2016 Technology Round-Up). Coupa has since incorporated Contractually’s pre-contract signature capabilities, like authoring, templates, editing/redlining, reviewing, and approving, into Coupa’s existing post-signature capabilities, like storage and search. As a result, users can now perform a wider array of contract management tasks within the Coupa application that allow them to seamlessly create contracts and collaborate with internal and external stakeholders, like Legal departments and Suppliers, to increase contract turn rates and visibility into the process.
InvoiceSmash: Designing to Eliminate Paper Invoices
Hammoud unveiled the early access program for InvoiceSmash, Coupa’s new release that is designed to eliminate manual keying of invoices. With the InvoiceSmash system, suppliers can generate PDF invoices in their accounts receivable system and send the documents to a specialized Coupa email address for processing. Once Coupa receives the emailed invoice, it automatically parses the invoice data and creates an electronic invoice; the InvoiceSmash system then applies machine learning principles to recognize fields and grow over time in order to improve on the invoice templates. As part of the “early access” program, a few client companies will be able to use InvoiceSmash ahead of general availability later this year.
Hammoud also unveiled some invoice advances that came as part of Coupa Release 15; users will gain greater control over exception handling, with the ability to define the criteria of who handles which exceptions. This is in addition to changes that will allow Coupa users to include invoice uniqueness by year as well as supplier pair—a requirement in some European nations—and also a focus on invoice compliance in countries that have strict laws.
Booking Freedom: An Attempt to Bring Consumer Travel into the Enterprise
One of the major travel trends that the Coupa team noticed, Hammoud said, is that consumers tend to not use travel agents anymore. This trend has transformed consumer travel, and Hammoud told attendees that employees—especially in midmarket companies—have started to bring that same consumer-travel attitude into the workplace. Everyone has their favorite travel provider, she said, and they want to use that preferred outlet for their business travel.
To make that happen, Hammoud said that Coupa created Booking Freedom—a product that will allow employees to use their travel provider of choice within the Coupa system. The only requirement is that users update any user profile they have with a new Coupa-generated email address. When that is done, the email confirmation from the travel provider will flow directly into the Coupa system and be placed into an expense report.
Hammoud also announced a method of helping employees adhere to travel policies. The “Beat the Target” open incentive program is designed to allow companies to create spending targets and, if employees exceed the target in terms of savings, the company will provide a cash incentive to the employee for following the travel policy. These new products are in addition to the announced integration with Sabre’s GetThere solution, which allows Sabre-generated expense reports to be imported directly into the Coupa platform.
Services Maestro: Conducting the Orchestra of Services Procurement
Hammoud closed out her keynote address with the reveal of Services Maestro, a new product designed to streamline the business process around contingent labor contract compliance and timesheet creation. With Services Maestro, business leaders can create negotiated contracts in Coupa that are invoice-ready documents. Once the contingent worker receives the summary email that Coupa generates, they can use the contract to create a timesheet directly in the Coupa platform, while also working in the environment of their choice.
When the contingent worker submits information back into Coupa using the summary document, the business leader then receives an invoice that is formatted the same as every other invoice in Coupa. Hammoud said this allows the business leader to approve information and, right away, provide a rating of the contingent worker in the Coupa platform. This instant ratings system has generated enough information, Hammoud said, that Coupa can also provide ratings of previous contingent workers directly to any user who is seeking contract labor. According to Hammoud, this will allow end users to select contractors who are already acquainted with the enterprise’s systems much more easily.
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