The Forrester Supplier Value Management (SVM) Wave
Many businesses know that it’s time for innovation and digital transformation—but there’s a hesitance to put these plans into action. Like any longstanding issue, manual and siloed business processes for managing supplier relationships and spend are familiar to many. However, siloed processes lead to challenges that are particularly costly during uncertain times: unrealized savings, inefficient manual processes, unknown risk exposures, suboptimal cash management, and compliance weaknesses—just to name a few.
Supplier Value Management (SVM) platforms help companies overcome these challenges and unleash the power of spend by breaking down longstanding silos with an end-to-end process across departments and providing leaders across the company with full visibility into spend.
In this report, Forrester establishes the importance of covering all of SVM as a single category and has named Coupa a leader. “Coupa retains SVM leadership with continuing innovation and customer obsession” – The Forrester Wave™: Supplier Value Management, Q1 2022.
Supplier Value Management aligns with Coupa’s longstanding approach to Business Spend Management
Forrester Research goes on to state “We expect it [Coupa] to continue delivering more domain-specific innovation than its rivals do, particularly via its Community.ai offerings.”
At Coupa, we’ve always believed in the strength of a holistic approach, The Forrester SVM Wave aligns to our end-to-end solutions in the Business Spend Management (BSM) space. Here are three reasons companies should seek out a digitally integrated Business Spend Management platform to strengthen their operations, embolden their employees, and protect their customers in the face of global adversity.
- Unplanned disruptions require agile responses from companies
A BSM platform provides AI-powered demand forecasting and supply chain modeling, helping planners quickly respond to disruption and move needs into sourcing, contracting, and purchasing. Flagged risks can proactively shift in-flight sourcing and purchasing away from risky suppliers, and visibility into the company’s real-time cash position can help finance and treasury leaders ensure that the company doesn’t run out of cash. - Companies must prioritize compliance with global and national ESG mandates as a business need
Nations around the world are increasingly adopting ESG-centered legislation like the recent German Supply Chain Act. Sustainability leaders must work with other teams (IT, finance, sourcing, supply chain) to meet sustainability goals when making spend decisions, and ensure that the impact can be quantified and reported to stakeholders. BSM platforms support this collaboration first by giving decision makers at all levels the information they need to make better—and greener—decisions. - Companies need an easy process to maximize spend under management and spend on-contract.
A BSM platform can provide visibility into all types of spend, approved invoices, and upcoming payments that sourcing and treasury departments typically lack. As a result, managers can understand the budget impact of each transaction, as well as where they may be slowing the process. Community-based supplier suggestions—and the ability to fully integrate risk vetting, sourcing, and contracting—avoid delays and errors that could lead to lost value.
Coupa’s unified BSM platform creates value through purposeful integration. Our BSM strategy prioritizes user-experience by mirroring the end-to-end business process and creating unified visibility and connection between processes and across all user personas.
“Coupa’s products excel at ease of use, resulting from its ‘the best UI is no UI’ philosophy.”
-Forrester Research
Interested in diving deeper into Forrester’s insights? Download the full report here.
For more information about Coupa’s approach to holistic Business Spend Management, and how to unlock hidden value for your business, checkout this eBook.