Smarter Together: How The Smart Cube Gives Coupa Customers Added Procurement Intelligence

Efficient and effective procurement processes are crucial for companies to ensure they’re getting the right products from the right people at the right price points.

But procurement markets and categories are always changing, and even small supply chain and market specific issues can have a huge impact on category prices, security of supply, and even customer satisfaction. 

Following the unexpected disruption and unforeseen market shifts we’ve experienced over the past couple of years, companies now face the dual challenges of getting their procurement spend back on track, while simultaneously building robust, reliable supplier portfolios. 

To do that, procurement teams need two types of intelligence. The first is a deep understanding of internal practices and spending – the kind of insight delivered by business spend management (BSM) platforms such as Coupa. The second is a clear view of what’s happening, and what’s likely to happen next across the supply markets and categories they depend on. That’s where The Smart Cube¹, a leading procurement intelligence and analytics provider, comes in. 

Recently, Coupa’s Donna Wilczek, Senior Vice President of Product Strategy and Innovation, sat down with Gautam Singh, CEO, The Smart Cube. Together, they discussed their new partnership, and answered some key questions about how it’s helping companies create a complete view of their procurement operations on the Coupa platform.

What value does The Smart Cube bring to Coupa’s BSM platform?

Gautam Singh: Coupa’s platform already provides a helpful ecosystem for procurement leaders – offering a single place for in-depth insights around their business spend management, including internal spend and contract data. 

Our platform, Amplifi PRO, adds an additional layer of complimentary external insights, including relevant category, market, and supplier data. Together, our platform and Coupa’s spend management tools offer a more complete picture of companies’ procurement operations – helping them make more informed decisions based on both internal and external insights.

Donna Wilczek: That’s exactly right. If you think about the role of a category manager, they need to know and stay on top of everything that’s happening in their category. That means understanding the market conditions, who they need to source from, what their pricing terms are, and what contracts they’re running.

The Smart Cube’s platform helps managers run their categories much more effectively – in less time, with less effort, and with the actionable insights they need, in one place.

What’s the benefit of accessing Amplifi PRO through the Coupa platform?

Donna Wilczek: Our customers are simplifying their IT infrastructure with a Coupa platform model that offers a single, holistic experience for their employees, effectively providing a single pane of glass for employees.

Partnering with intelligence providers like The Smart Cube allows us to deliver an easy-to-use platform with convenient access points to other valuable resources, such as Amplifi PRO, built right into the Coupa screens. 

It means companies don’t need to implement and manage dozens of separate technologies. They can get everything they need to make insight-driven decisions with a wide-variety of partner solutions that can easily connect into the customer’s Coupa platform. 

Gautam Singh: Today’s category managers have so many free and paid-for sources to choose from, they often face an overflow of data. 

Using Amplifi PRO through the Coupa platform, category managers can access valuable, consolidated insights in a single source for procurement intelligence - from category, supply market and supplier intelligence, to commodity price indices, cost models and more - all analysed and enhanced by our expert analysts.

Plus, many of The Smart Cube’s clients use the Coupa platform. Our partnership allows us to give these customers access to all the custom intelligence work we’re producing for them on an ongoing basis, through a single sign-on interface. 

How can Coupa’s platform users access Amplifi PRO?

Gautam Singh: Amplifi PRO is available on the Coupa App Marketplace, and it’s free for people to register. Anybody using the Coupa platform can get complimentary access to intelligence on Amplifi PRO that’ll help them in their workflow on an easy, self-serve basis. 

For companies that want a greater level of intelligence, we offer premium tiers, with the highest tier providing complete access to our entire procurement intelligence portfolio for all their employees. Coupa’s platform users can also choose between using Amplifi PRO as a panel app within Coupa’s Supplier Module, or as an iframe app that businesses can enable and embed within their own platform.

We then offer the chance to make custom requests through the catalog function of Amplifi PRO. This is ideal for when a category manager finds a relevant piece of data, but wants more in-depth, contextualised insight into what the data means for their business. And with our one-to-many framework, all of that company’s users get access to the intelligence shared as part of the request. 

Donna Wilczek: I look at The Smart Cube’s solution as democratization of intelligence. All too often, only large organizations can afford to invest the time and resources in in-depth market intelligence research. But with Amplifi PRO through the Coupa platform, all our users can access market intelligence no matter their size.

It's such a wonderful add-on, and it’s one that’s always updating – whenever The Smart Cube’s team add intelligence to the platform, all our users benefit. Ultimately, it helps companies gain the insights they need to accelerate their procurement maturity.

Have questions? Get in touch with us.

Sources:

¹ The Smart Cube, 2022