Coupa Software, a leader in business spend management (BSM), today announced new product innovations to advance the company’s BSM capabilities. Debuted at its annual Inspire conference in San Francisco, the innovations include enhancements to community intelligence, third-party systems, and user-centric experiences that will provide businesses even more visibility into spend, processes, and performance. 

“Traditionally, finance and procurement teams faced numerous challenges that have prevented effective visibility throughout their organisations,” said Raja Hammoud, senior vice president of products at Coupa. “Our BSM solution brings everything together with a single, easy-to-use cloud platform, and our new product enhancements take that holistic approach even further, enabling spend-focused analysis by decision makers.” 

Community Intelligence

The new product release focuses on business fraud, category spend, and employee responsiveness to help customers make accelerated, data-driven decisions usingprescriptive community intelligence.

Spend Guard uses artificial intelligence (AI) to analyse employee spend transactions to help detect potential fraud. Spend Guard takes an important step in transforming fraud auditing by analysing employee behaviours across all spend applications on the Coupa platform to help detect potential fraud. This application is currently available in an early access program. 

Commodity Insights helps businesses optimise category spend. Insights include identification of top suppliers for critical commodities, spend benchmarks, and recommendations to maximise spend value.

Approver Cycle Times empowers users to speed up or slow down the approval process by comparing individual performance to peer performance.

Open Platform for Third-Party Systems 

The new release extends the value of BSM with third-party systems to support end-to-end business processes that span different functions across an enterprise.

Coupa Inventory is now voice activated. Users can access Amazon Alexa® voice commands to locate items, adjust inventory balances, and reorder stock. The voice capability is currently available in an early access program. 

Coupa Open Buy expands to include supplier items and pricing content from additional suppliers such as Imperial Supplies, Office Depot, and Staples. The additional suppliers are currently available in an early access program. 

Coupa Risk Aware monitors hundreds of data sources to reduce supply chain risk. The application can now integrate with customers’ own sources of governance, risk, and compliance (GRC) data and enables customers to calibrate the data sources to create their own supplier health score.

User-centric Experiences

Coupa continues to deliver more user-centric experiences to increase productivity such as:

·        Automatic tax coding for supplier invoices

·        Contract creation from Coupa Sourcing Optimisation

·        Improved handling of business requests that do not result in purchases

“Coupa’s cloud platform coupled with its continuous innovation is a strategic asset for businesses,” said Mickey North Rizza, program vice president, enterprise applications and digital commerce at IDC. “The company’s rapid development of innovative digital tools for business spend management has improved the user experience across business spend and enhanced the value to focus on the supplier. This is why we have recognised them as a global leader in our recent IDC MarketScape reports.”