Coupa vs. Zip Intake-to-Procure

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.

Zip can be used for routing all vendor-level approvals for new vendors and all renewals across our organization. It can also be helpful for managing all purchases from existing vendors. For non-spend related approvals, it’s not as well suited. Zip was definitely designed for procurement workflows. They also have a vendor management portal that links up directly to something like NetSuite for management and visibility.

• 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

• No coding - Ability for the administrator to make changes without development resources helps us be agile as a procurement org.
• Visibility to the user in a great user interface
• Accountability (helps us track SLAs on response time), Audit trails keeping track of everything
• The implementation team was incredible, as is ongoing support. They want you to succeed in your goals vs. just implement their tool

• 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

• There are some duplicated fields such as anticipated total spend vs. price line item breakdown that asks for the same thing. This is a little bit tedious
• Does not show which invoices got processed and applied to open POs
• Does not integrate / migrate special custom fields within Zip Intake-to-Procure into other tech stacks (NetSuite)

Incentivized

Incredibly responsive and helpful.

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

I prefer Zip for its for its user-friendly interface and ease of adoption, especially if the organization values a simpler and more intuitive system for users across various departments. Comparatively, Zip is a more budget-friendly solution compared to some enterprise-level systems like SAP ARIBA or Oracle PeopleSoft, especially for smaller or mid-sized organizations with specific procurement needs.

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

• Visibility for all necessary approvers and reviewers of the process.
• Lack of open API to other systems (i.e Mondays, Smartsheet) is causing concerns for team that might want to move away from current tool.
• No 3rd party implementation required is huge cost / time savings.

Incentivized