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Proactive, Collaborative Inventory Management

Spot shortages and excesses in real time as you coordinate inventory movement between suppliers and buyers. Reduce buffer stock, free up working capital, and improve overall inventory levels — all while enhancing productivity and transactional efficiency.

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Benefits
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FAQs

Help your suppliers help you

Early visibility for proactive inventory management

Gain visibility into inventory across multiple supplier sites, empowering manufacturers and suppliers to proactively manage shortages and excesses. A single, shared source of real-time data and precise tracking helps you make better decisions while reducing excess safety stock requirements, carrying costs, and working capital liability.

Improve supplier fill rates and reduce stock-outs

Achieve smoother inventory management with automated suggestions and supplier-managed inventory tools that help you achieve pull-based replenishment based on set minimum and maximum levels. Avoid supply chain delays with workflows and scheduling agreements that integrate with your ERP and reduce cumbersome, manual efforts.

Turn disruptions into opportunities

Identify risks early with predictive analytics. Exception dashboards help you understand and act on potential issues to improve supply continuity and keep costs low. Customizable alerts notify teams about excess inventory or potential shortages. When disruption occurs, automated workflows make it easier to fix supply issues fast.

Simplify and streamline supplier communication

Share data and improve collaboration between buyers and suppliers on a single, secure cloud platform. With supplier managed inventory, suppliers can update inventory directly and communicate with your organization through traceable, audit-ready messages — reducing
document overwhelm and improving efficiency.

Drive supplier accountability and improvement

With easy tracking of key supplier metrics like order confirmation speed and on-time delivery rates, quickly identify your most reliable suppliers. With clear communication, you can also suggest specific improvements to drive consistent, high-quality outcomes while strengthening supplier relationships.

Inventory & Direct Spend

Analyst Report

Infographic: Reimagining Direct Spend with Coupa

View Supply Chain Resources

FAQs

How does a demand planning system differ from Supply Chain Collaboration/ Inventory Collaboration?

Your demand planning system can help you estimate how much of each material you will need to make enough products to meet your sales plan. For example, if you’re a cookie manufacturer, you’d need to figure out how many cookies you aim to sell in a particular quarter and then calculate how much butter, flour, sugar, eggs, etc. you’d need to produce enough cookies to meet that plan.

Where Supply Chain Collaboration comes in is when you need to communicate future requirements to your suppliers so that you know they can deliver. Supply Chain Collaboration helps you with that supplier connection and communication component, which is often missing from most demand planning systems.

Where do my warehouse management systems fit with Inventory Collaboration?

Warehouse management systems help you manage inventory levels of day-to-day direct and MRO consumables in your plants. They’re important to daily operations, but communicating with suppliers is often a cumbersome, manual process. Suppliers lack visibility into inventory levels and require a PO to take any action, even if they have a multi-year contract.

Inventory Collaboration gives buyers and suppliers visibility across warehouses to monitor minimum and maximum levels to avoid these manual processing challenges. It increases supplier productivity and automates workflows to improve responsiveness to sudden increases in demand.

Where does a workflow with Coupa Inventory Collaboration look like?

Coupa receives demand, inventory, and minimum/maximum signals from the ERP or WMS and shares this data with suppliers through the Coupa Supplier Portal. This allows suppliers to see real-time stock levels and receive automatic notifications about items that need restocking.

Suppliers then ship the goods and update the purchase order (PO) to an advanced shipment notice, informing customers about the expected arrival of the stock. AI insights are also provided to help suppliers optimize inventory management and reduce costs.

Both suppliers and buyers have full visibility into their shipments, promoting collaboration at each step. Goods receipt occurs in the WMS, and a copy is brought into Coupa. Invoice matching and reconciliation take place in Coupa, and payments can be made in Coupa or through the ERP, with this part of the process remaining the same for PO collaboration and forecast collaboration.

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