What do you do when you’re hired into an organization to revamp the procurement processes for an organization about to go IPO?

You quickly centralize the procurement function and automate the requisition and approval processes to create efficiencies and capture the data you need to perform meaningful spend analysis.

Kate Vincent joined Grand Canyon University in October, just before the company’s public listing on NASDAQ. A procurement veteran from a much larger educational institution, Kate inherited a procurement function driven by paper-based requisition that often required employees to walk across campus for an approval signature. The management tool was an accounting system that was extremely difficult to report against. To analyze organization spend, Kate had to export the data from the accounting system, and reformat it for Excel, a grueling manual process which could take hours.

One common character trait across all the Spend Samurai we have featured in the Coupa Cabana this week has been their ability to manage the change processes and communications for their e-procurement. Grand Canyon University went live on Coupa e-Procurement in January. What Kate was able to achieve in three short months was a full evaluation and selection of an e-procurement platform, the development of a change management process and communication plan to introduce the new tool and procurement processes, an e-procurement rollout and training. The results so far – efficiency improvements, improved spend visibility and cost savings from the few categories of spend which were placed under management first. More impressively, the communication plan has generated so much enthusiasm that Kate has already doubled the number of users on Coupa e-Procurement. Department heads want to “be looped into” the approval workflow so they can track actual spending against their departmental budgets.  In her words…