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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Workday Strategic Sourcing
Score 7.8 out of 10
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Workday Strategic Sourcing, formerly Scout RFP, which was acquired by Workday in late 2019, is a collaborative, cloud-based solution that makes sourcing a strategic arm of the business by providing greater visibility throughout the entire sourcing and supplier engagement process. The solution boasts 300,000 users in more than 155 countries have who manage their spend with the application.
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.
Scout RP is wonderful to help keep an RFP very organized. It is excellent to have a single version, so that all team members helping compile an RFP response have a single place to know that they are on the current version. If a company doesn't want to respond within Scout RFP, it's my understanding that the RFP information can be exported from Scout RFP, compiled in a different tool (like XLS), and then pulled back into Scout RFP for submission. From a collaboration standpoint, there's not an easy way to "assign" questions or items. Sometimes at my company, we need different experts to answer different questions. We have to use another tool, like email or Slack, to let that person know he/she needs to answer. However, in other tools, a certain block can be assigned to the person internally within the tool.
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.
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.
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.
I have only used RFPIO to facilitate searching for RFP answers. I have used Scout RFP only to respond to customer RFPs. I assume they have functional overlap, but my interactions with each have not included this functional overlap. For each tool's respective use, I have found them very simple, intuitive, and helpful.
