Coupa Software (NASDAQ:COUP), a leader in cloud-based spend management, announced today that Coupa Open Buy with Amazon Business is now generally available in the United States and a pilot will launch soon in both Germany and the United Kingdom with an initial set of customers.

Coupa Open Buy with Amazon Business expands an organisation’s buying options by giving its employees access to the Amazon Business marketplace. The solution gives Coupa users embedded visibility and instant access to millions of items beyond the catalogues managed by their employer. This means that employees are no longer restricted to buying from company-managed catalogues that may not offer what they need.

“Coupa Open Buy with Amazon Business is a game-changer for unified catalogue management and real guided buying. It’s not just a small step forward for marketplace, catalogue and tail spend innovation but a larger leap for allowing employee usability and right-sized controls,” said Pierre Mitchell, managing director of Spend Matters and Azul Partners. “In other words, start with adoption and then use the visibility to continuously improve.”

In addition, the solution helps reduce the rate of ‘item not found’ and decreases the likelihood of employees buying outside their organisations’ approved processes. Organisations reap the benefits of lower total costs, improved spend compliance, and higher end user adoption. Employees benefit from a simplified process - they only have to search once and get back consolidated results from both corporate catalogues and the Amazon Marketplace.

In many organisations, employees are required to buy from specific catalogues maintained by their employer. Due to ever-changing needs, employees may not find what they need in these catalogues. This may cause an employee to buy goods outside of their corporate-approved channels, but doing so can result in non-compliant spending - without proper budget checks or approvals.

Coupa’s flexible configuration capabilities give customers the ability to tailor the Coupa Open Buy solution to meet their organisation's specific needs.  

“We started using Coupa Open Buy with Amazon Business during the early access program and immediately saw great results,” said Ari Perlman, senior director of sourcing and procurement at TEGNA. “Our employees now have access to Amazon Business and all the controls TEGNA needs to run our business are automatically applied within Coupa. Employees love it, and unmanaged spend immediately dropped.”

“Coupa and Amazon Business are working together to create a more seamless purchasing experience for businesses,” said Todd Heimes, director, Amazon Business International. “Coupa Open Buy provides Amazon Business customers with increased visibility and instant access to millions of items in an open marketplace through Amazon Business.”

Coupa customers benefit from the Amazon Business e-commerce expertise and gain visibility into full product catalogues on an established multi-seller marketplace, which helps eliminate the need to manage individual catalogues.

“Open marketplaces are the future of spend management, and we’re leading the way by applying our deep understanding of enterprise needs to deliver pragmatic innovations for the real-world,” said Donna Wilczek, vice president of product strategy and innovation at Coupa. “Our unique collaboration with Amazon Business shows that wrapping an open marketplace with smart technology actually works and quickly delivers value to mid and large enterprises.” 

Amazon Business, available in the U.S., U.K., Germany, Japan and India, is a marketplace that combines the selection, convenience and value customers have come to know and love from Amazon, with new features and unique benefits tailored to the needs of businesses. Amazon Business provides easy access to hundreds of millions of products — everything from IT and lab equipment to education and food-service supplies. Amazon Business offers business-only pricing on millions of products and access to more than 85,000 business sellers. For more information visit amazon.co.uk/business and amazon.de/business.