For those of you who have been following my cross-country quest to find procurement enlightenment, my other stop in Michigan was a visit with today’s featured Spend Samurai – Rob Biter of Entertainment Publications.  You probably know Entertainment – they sell coupon books with those great 2-for-1 and 50% off restaurant coupons (actually, I’m sure they have other coupons too…but, well, Coupa Sam likes to eat).

On the one hand, you can see how coupon usage would increase during a recession.  But for Entertainment, customers have to buy the coupon books – which means an upfront investment to get better deals on exactly the type of discretionary purchases most people are trying to cut out of their budgets.  And many of those books are sold through fundraisers to support non-profit organizations, and we all know that charitable giving tends to go down during a recession (with notable exceptions, like the Spend Samurai at Neediest Kids who use their e-procurement prowess as a competitive advantage over other non-profits competing for the same charitable contributions).

So spend controls are pretty important for Entertainment, and the Spend Samurai I interviewed at Entertainment Publications is particularly savvy with how to squeeze every penny of efficiency and productivity out of the purchasing process and the team he manages.  Rob estimated that nearly 85% of Entertainment’s non-payroll spending is requisitioned through the Coupa purchasing platform.  And the network of users continues to expand.  Perhaps most impressively, though, is that Rob and his team of Spend Samurai are able to keep up with the workload even though their group has shrunk from eight employees to just three.  Watch this excerpt from my interview with Rob to learn how they’ve done it, and maybe you’ll come away just a little scrappier yourself!