Coupa’s cloud-native Business Spend Management
(BSM) platform provides end-to-end processes
that helps drive collaboration
across for every business leader from supply chain, procurement,
finance, treasury, compliance, and IT and supply chain
leaders to help their companies to get the visibility and control they need to
spend smarter, mitigate risk, and improve
resilience. A
unified platform approach frees up IT from complex integrations to help
leaders deliver on these goals.
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PSA
Score 5.8 out of 10
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Upland PSA helps professional services teams grow their business.
I am new to customer-supplier portals in my career. I use several different ones in my current role, including Ariba and Tipalti. To be honest, I don't really enjoy the user experience of any of them. I can see how larger companies may benefit from their services but for my current role submitting invoices on them and filling out vendor information requests seems somewhat clunky to me. When I'm in Coupa, the easiest, most non-clunky process for me is when I'm successfully connected with a customer who has successfully created their purchase order and I can easily upload my invoice to said PO. To me, emailing customer invoices directly to the customer from our invoicing system seems like the easier route of delivering an invoice. I suppose it is helpful and reassuring to know that an invoice has been successfully uploaded into a company's system rather than waiting to find out if your emailed invoice made it to the correct department for payment processing.
We have discovered over the last few years using Tenrox that we could adapt our needs or processes to fit in the Tenrox box rather than adapting Tenrox to fit in ours completely. I feel like Tenrox would be better suited for a company that has fewer clients and projects over the course of a year, as well as fewer users. We have approximately 350 clients, 21,077 projects in Tenrox at this exact moment (we close projects as we can), 188 active users currently, and 415,635 tasks (some of course assigned to now closed projects). With this much information hosted through the Tenrox cloud server, we experience increased lag time frequently. This causes a lot of unwanted rejection towards Tenrox in our company.
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.
We love that our timesheets are pre-populated with all our employee's assigned contracts and we get to control what is on their timesheet as far as funder and contract codes.
Tenrox did very well with our integration and getting a timesheet that exports well with our payroll provider.
Tenrox has a great email reminder system for when people need to submit or approve timesheets.
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.
Tax calculation per state tax rules. Tenrox's current capabilities relative to tax codes is extremely limited and we have to do several time-consuming work-arounds in order to apply the tax as needed for our business. What is particularly frustrating about this aspect is that our need is based on tax laws and codes set by states and I feel a financial system should be able to sufficiently structure for legally-defined tax codes.
Tenrox Project Planning add-on module. This portion of the system has never worked as seamlessly as you would assume given they were designed to work together. We've run in to many bugs and just oddities over the years. It's very finicky in my experience. We only use TPP for a small portion of our projects - those being our smaller or need to have huge task lists per client naming requirements.
(The bad that became the good!) In the past, we have had significant customer-service challenges with Tenrox and then Upland, however over the past several months we have noticed a marked change in this. If we had not previously experienced issues with the customer service, I would not have any issue with the level of service that we are currently receiving. Given the history, I am cautiously optimistic that our current level of customer service will continue. I think our service concerns finally reached the 'right' people and I am reasonably confident the positive changes are here to stay!
I am not in charge of renewing the Tenrox contract. However, if it was up to me, I would renew in a heartbeat. Tenrox is an asset to our organization and it keeps us focused. I am not aware of other products similar to Tenrox that provide the depth that they do.
I feel like if the user interface could combine time and expense for users to be entered on one screen rather than two completely separate locations it would greatly improve usability. If the expense entry process could be improved completely, it would greatly improve the usability as well. Everything else within Tenrox, makes everything very user friendly.
The support team is always very helpful and strives to ensure they have met your needs and corrected your issues in a timely manner. If they need more information or cannot recreate the issue themselves, then they will follow-up to gather the necessary data themselves. They are constantly striving to meet the needs of all users and understand so many different industries and types of environments out there, it is very impressive.
The main thing with implementation is to make sure you have taken full advantage of the "sandbox testing" site that Tenrox provides to you during development. Try out every scenario you can think of, have other people enter information if needed, so that you can make sure you have not missed any big items. If you have the opportunity, roll out implementation to small groups of users. Depending on how your company is set up, I would choose groups that are not all in the same department so that you can address questions across all areas before adding in more users in the next wave of implementation.
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.
The Tenrox software looks and feels older and is not as user friendly! Harvest, for example, is an upgraded version that is easier to track and compile. This is what I'm comparing it to and it's not even close! We only selected Tenrox because it was cheaper and we had a connection in the company with someone at Tenrox to use that platform. We are currently looking for a change.
Tracking, tracking, tracking. It keeps the data we need and gives us the ability to look at it in countless different ways with just a few clicks, which is a big time saver. Without Tenrox, we would definitely have to increase our headcount in order to accomplish billing and payroll.
We recently were able to automate a huge portion of business that was still (yes, still in 2014!) being managed out of an Excel spreadsheet. We experienced a great deal of resistance to the change with our own employees, however now that we have it going we have cleaned up our invoicing and impressed the highest-financial officer for two consecutive months - our first/only two months billing directly from Tenrox for that group.
A newer development for our team - Some client managers in the other divisions our company have begun to look at what we are able to do with Tenrox and our other primary system and get some of their work moved over to our group. This is great and is giving us new opportunities - we will likely need to increase the headcount of our admin. team, but for a good reason (too much work coming our way!).
