Coupa vs. Power BI For Office 365 (discontinued)

Suitable: Simple indirect procurement. Low cost; short cycle implementation. Less Suitable: Complex procurement scenario requiring serious vendor collaboration. End-to-end integration. Direct Material Procurement, especially when planning, quality inspection, and other miscellaneous activities are involved, requires handling various special statuses and updates to meet industry- or country-specific requirements.

Incentivized

If you're already using Office 365, Power BI for O365 is an easy choice. Start playing around with the free version and then easily add individual Pro licenses with little risk. However, if you anticipate using this with many users, it can get expensive quickly.

Incentivized

• Coupa is easy to use, however, we had to teach our end users about procurement. They are not used to conducting an RFP, onboarding a supplier, or preparing a PO. This is the change management that our employees had to be prepared to understand. The Shelby Group helped us with the implementation.
• The hardest part was the integration between NetSuite and Coupa. We wanted to have a dynamic tight integration between the two solutions. If we adjusted the chart of accounts or added a new supplier we wanted it to be able to done in both systems and be available immediately in both systems. We used a partner called SuiteSkies to accomplish this dynamic integration.
• We’ve been able to manage the implementation and maintenance with a very lean IT group.

Incentivized

• Easy to make visual dashboards from SQL queries. Previously we had to use a third party application that had to run on a web server that was so complex to setup and run. PowerBI removes all that.
• Ability to control who/which group has access to each dashboard or report. Ties in well with the rest of the Office 365 ecosystem.
• Has many connectors to allow pulling data from various systems, both onsite (via gateway) or external (via APIs), and join the data to create a report/dashboard.
• Ability to show data but also export the data, if permitted.
• Easy to show PowerBI dashboards on SharePoint or on other websites via embedded code.

Incentivized

• Support Team - A little slow in responding. I think the tool is so configurable that they struggle with figuring out what is causing certain issues that are being submitted on the portal.
• I'd love for the Sourcing Module to be able to support larger events. There seems to be a limit on the number of lines each event can support and as a growing retailer, our store count dictates we have room to grow and that each store is represented in the bid process.
• Would like to see the ability to issue multiple POs for a single item to multiple locations. The tool may do this but I know I can't and it may be due to how we interface with our ERP.

Incentivized

• Licensing: Currently, Microsoft has a fixed pricing model for Office 365 users, regardless of role/function of the user. Most organizations have a small number of "power users" that create usable content and many more "consumers" that simply view/run reports created by power users. Microsoft does not differentiate between these users, and thus the pricing limits organizations from large deployments of the software.
• Version incompatibility: Excel 2010 and 2013 workbooks are compatible with each other. However, workbooks created in 2010 that include PowerPivot databases must be upgraded to 2013 format to run in 2013. Subsequently, you cannot open these upgraded PowerPivot workbooks in 2010. This requires ALL users to be on the same version.
• Visualization: Excel charting with PowerPivot workbooks is adequate for many users. Power View also contains a number of GREAT visualizations, including animated bubble charts and a very flexible dashboard/report design canvas. However, compared to some of the other self-service BI solutions, it is still limited in its visualization capabilities.

I love using coupa but i'm not the decision maker in this regard.

Incentivized

I will continue to recommend this suite to folks looking for a reporting and analytics solution, as I find in MOST cases, it's great at meeting almost every requirement I've been given by a multitude of clients across a range of industries. I've built Capacity Planning solutions that allowed end user input which was then submitted to SharePoint, Executive Dashboards, custom applications, simple analytical tools for teams to easily slice and dice data, and super simple reports as well as some very complicated ones. If you haven't seen the demos online, do a search, and see for yourself - this is a great BI suite! (I do not work for Microsoft, although I do consult out there from time to time. I do occasionally make a recommendation for a different BI reporting tool, but in general, find Excel can accomplish quite a bit for less money and in less time.)

-Could be easy or hard to use depending on corporate policies and compliance. At times, errors and cryptical message associated with them could drive users mad.

Incentivized

We are satisfied with the functionality and capabilities of Power BI. Product is cost effective and full-fill the reporting requirements of the organization. You can perform most of the report level complex analysis with the help of DAX which makes Power BI very powerful analytic tool. Power BI for Office 365 has gone away and Power BI is the next evolution of it. Power BI comes with your Office 365 E5 subscription or you can purchase licensing for it separately.

Incentivized

-Support is generally speaking OK (not great). The user community is quite active, and the response time is acceptable. I would certainly hope there's more user-generated content (like in SAP, Oracle, and Linux, etc.), but I suppose Coupa is still not large enough, and the incentives are not yet there.

Incentivized

as of now there is strong community for Power BI, you can get solution for most of your problems from there. Also you can send your error to Microsoft as well. After every 15 days they release updates to overcome all the issues of defects.

Incentivized

The employee that trained me was not particularly interesting in teaching me but they were not a Coupa employee.

Incentivized

Concur was a lot easier and more user friendly for employees doing expense reports on their phone. That is not the case with Coupa. You must use your laptop to do expenses and our managers don't always have enough time to do that while out in the field working. This has caused some issues.

Incentivized

Oracle was nice, super expensive to implement if it's not in use already. JobDiva is choppy and heavy on the system while does not give great reports. Salesforce is good; remote access is good however their support is terrible

Incentivized

• It has allowed for proper processing of expenses tied directly to the proper LOB and GL Codes
• Has taken the guesswork away and allowed for the proper budgets to be hit and reconciled
• Ease of use has led to mass adoption and more prompt processing of expenses

Incentivized

• As a Microsoft Partner implementing Business Intelligence solutions, Power BI has removed the barrier for our clients to begin the "BI journey". So often, projects get hung up in that early phase of procuring and installing/configuring expensive hardware and software. Just simply getting started and designing a beginning solution has allowed our clients to see results in 1-2 weeks using their data that might have taken months to achieve otherwise.
• One significant ROI example is process improvement. In many cases, individuals or teams are spending days each month gathering data from multiple sources for reporting to their constituents. We are reducing these times to minutes by automating many of the data collection and integration processes that were previously manual.