Coupa’s e-procurement platform is well-suited to the special needs of education, assisting in streamlining operations and providing fiscal oversight on every aspect of procurement, from enrollment campaigns to IT expenditures to student services.

Common procurement challenges in education include:

• Tracking and reporting against grant-specific spending
• Better visibility and budgeting on enrollment campaigns
• Standardize IT equipment ordering
• Improve operating efficiency to offset personnel reductions and budget cuts

Visibility of expenditures against grants.

How do procurement, finance, and research heads get a handle on how much grant money has been used, and how much is remaining?  They use Coupa’s  reporting capabilities to track each transaction in Coupa to a specific grant.  Coupa has easy to use analysis tools to give grant owners real-time visibility into how much grant money has been used, and which items have been procured with those funds – significantly reducing the grant reporting burden.  You can even set automatic email alerts to grant owners when funds dip below a certain level.   Coupa e-Procurement gives educational instutitions the tools they need to demonstrate strong control over how grant funding is used, which can only make it easier to secure new grants in the future.

Leveraging the buying power of a de-centralized user base.

Departments within educational institutions tend to operate as independent entities, especially when it comes to how they purchase goods and services.  Coupa provides a purchasing system that allows departments the autonomy they need, but still provides the procurement organization with a central system through which operational efficiencies and cost savings can be achieved.  Coupa’s advanced approval workflow capabilities ensure that the correct managers are approving relevant spend.  Coupa can segregate catalog content, punch-out sites, and other supplier-specific content at the departmental or business group level, making the system easy to use and highly relevant to each group.  All of this rich transactional data is available to procurement to negotiate better contracts and pricing with suppliers, leveraging the power of the Coupa platform.

Limited time and bandwidth to implement a complex system and train users.

Higher education institutions often lack the resources required to implement complex procurement systems and to train people how to use it effectively.  With Coupa, they can be up and running in as little as a few days, at a fraction of the cost, and without IT support.  And with a user experience that is more like Amazon.com than traditional enterprise software, personnel can be trained on Coupa’s procure-to-pay functionality in as little as ten minutes.