What if you could accelerate the time-to-value of your procure-to-pay solution — even before you rolled it out? What could you start doing today? This is just one of the many areas in which Coupa Professional Services offers support. We caught up with Reitu Bolata, a South Africa-based Principal Engagement Manager in the Professional Services team to find out more. She’s been removing the pain from procure-to-pay solution pre-implementation across Europe, the Middle East, and Africa for years.
I’ve supported more than 50 procure-to-pay solution implementations during my career at Coupa, and truly, no two are alike. But I’ve noticed a pattern, sort of a transformation in three acts. I affectionately call these “the set-up” (pre-implementation), “the wise-up” (implementation), and “the clean-up” (post-implementation). When I think of the set-up, I remember what Abraham Lincoln said: “If I had four hours to chop down a tree, I’d spend the first two hours sharpening the axe.” Our customers can already do so much to start preparing their systems and processes to help fast-track value creation from their procure-to-pay solution.
Below are six best practices I’ve helped Coupa customers follow. But it reflects the lessons learned from our community — and perhaps it gives you a starting point, too.
Best practice #1: Know your “why” and define the value case
Action item: Align your procurement, finance, and AP KPIs with broader transformation goals to ensure that Coupa’s implementation drives measurable business outcomes rather than operating in isolation. If automation is a key pillar, for example, procurement metrics should reflect the intersection of procurement and automation.
Why: By aligning your procure-to-pay solution’s implementation with your company’s broader transformation roadmap, you’re turning procurement, finance, and AP into a strategic enabler of enterprise-wide goals, not just an initiative focused on hard savings. A well-integrated procurement transformation does more than optimize processes. It strengthens the entire organization by aligning with strategic business objectives. Structuring goals under key buckets, such as speed, cost, quality, and compliance, helps prioritize and track impact effectively.
Insights:
- Your company’s annual report is an excellent resource. Review this document to pinpoint headwinds and tailwinds that impact where procurement intersects with the key pillars mentioned earlier.
- Your Coupa team will help you develop a value case and identify pain points that support the business case. A business case aligned with the annual report will reflect strategic priorities for maximum impact.
Want more insight into what best-in-class performance looks like and where your company stands?
Best practice #2: Know your business and identify a Vision Custodian
Action item: Actively seek a “Vision Custodian” — someone who will keep the “why” alive throughout the project. This individual(s):
- Holds an in-depth understanding of the organization’s structure, key suppliers, and strategic objectives and knows the organization well enough to talk about it in depth.
- Serves as a knowledge anchor, ensuring continuity and alignment with the organization’s vision, especially when the project sponsor is unavailable.
Why: Without a Vision Custodian, focus may drift toward either high-level aspirations or day-to-day tasks. This role ensures that the project remains aligned with the case for change, and future objectives.
Insights: One way you can help the Vision Custodian bridge strategic goals with actionable insights is by leveraging the results from Coupa’s Vendor (Supplier) Match Report. Your team can use this information to segment suppliers and start thinking about targeted sourcing and purchasing strategic frameworks for business scenarios that should be addressed during the Coupa design workshops.
Best practice #3: Know and build your team
Action items:
- Project manager: Invest in a project manager with digital transformation experience.
- Team members: Consult business unit leaders early to cherry-pick appropriate team members based on clear profiles. Incorporate project work into development plans and plan around key business activities such as year-end, audits, and holidays to minimize conflicts. This ensures timely training and targeted interventions.
Why:
- Project manager: This person is the heartbeat of the project, ensuring momentum is maintained by aligning teams, managing timelines, and adapting to challenges, and managing risks. Skill and experience allows them to keep things ticking, weaving in best practices while staying focused on their core mission — no matter how many curveballs come their way.
- Team members: Leverage an “A-team” in which each member understands their own role early on and how it supports the others on the team. This will help remove roadblocks during the design and follow-on phase.
Insights:
- Project manager: Don’t assign this role to someone who is untrained or already juggling multiple responsibilities. The implementation phase is not the time to train someone for this role. Avoid perceived savings and hire a qualified, experienced professional.
- Team members: When building a team, notify the members’ business unit leaders about their involvement. Incorporate project work into development plans and plan around key business activities, such as the year-end close, audits, and holidays, to minimize conflicts.
Learn why getting the right people on board at the right time is critical to a smooth implementation. Our infographic explains why.
Best practice #4: Know your policies and processes
Action item: Begin documenting your company’s policies and processes around purchasing — even if they aren’t fully defined yet.
Start at the source. The best sources include:
- Process owners (for existing policy documents and standard operating procedures)
- IT teams (for architecture landscape, system workflows, and previous ERP implementations)
- Compliance teams (for audit findings and improvement areas)
Why: Knowing how things are currently done — or not done — helps identify bottlenecks, inefficiencies, and areas for improvement, preparing you for a smoother implementation. This is how to start building procure-to-pay policies that are robust and help streamline your company’s operations.
It’s also important to start thinking about not just what you buy, but also how you buy — while being honest about your current process and its gaps. Since different scenarios require different strategies, having a policy that covers all purchasing types and categories enhances accountability. Without it, how will employees know what guides their procurement decision-making?
Insights: Drill down into what purchases are made, from whom, where, when, and why with Coupa’s AI-driven Spend Classification, an approach that delivers exceptional levels of accuracy when categorizing spend thanks in part to our unique customer-contributed dataset of more than $7 trillion of global transactional spend.
Learn how companies like yours set the stage for success with their Coupa implementation. Join us at the Coupa Inspire World Tour in five cities on four continents.
Best practice #5: Know your data with a data audit
Action items:
- Assign a data lead early who will help identify the pain points in your data quality issues.
- Put together an action plan based on those findings.
Why: An action plan won’t solve issues overnight, but it will mitigate unnecessary delays once the project is underway. Procure-to-pay solutions deliver the most benefits when they work with high-quality data.
Insights: Efficient data management ensures clear actionable insights. Data analyzed based on relevance, not legacy, is what eliminates inefficiencies. Be specific — which data needs attention? For example, do you really need all your existing 100 supplier payment terms or were many inherited from a legacy system and not used and are actually duplicates?
Better output starts with better input.
Best practice #6: Know your IT and architecture landscape
Action item: Get very familiar with your applications including middleware, owners and resources that support each application, as well as the impact of Coupa on that landscape.
Why: A clear view of your IT ecosystem ensures a smoother procure-to-pay solution implementation by identifying dependencies, potential challenges, and integration points early in the process.
Insights: A valuable resource is prior ERP implementations documentation. Be aware of ongoing IT projects, maintain a list of IT systems that will be replaced or impacted, and identify their owners — especially those managing the contracts.
Stay tuned for Act 2: The Wise-up, where we delve into the crucial implementation phase.
