Coupa Customers Lead the Way in Building Innovative Supply Chains

A trusted supply chain is essential to meeting your customer needs and business goals. Your supply chain has to be agile to respond quickly to unexpected disruptions and a dynamically changing market. You need a partner you can rely on to shape effective supply chain solutions, not only for Plan A or Plan B, but for every risk scenario. You need a partner and a platform with market expertise and a drive for continuous innovation.

For more than 3,000 organizations around the world — organizations in every industry and of every size — Coupa is that trusted partner. Our platform delivers rapid supply chain plans and prescriptions that get you around market obstacles and ahead of your competitors.

We see digital transformation giving way to a new age of intelligence, where the pace of innovation is redefining opportunity. That’s especially true in the supply chain, where minute-by-minute developments with suppliers, freight forwarders, and distributors can have lasting ramifications for any business. Combining the experiences and insights from our global Coupa community with our platform empowers organizations to overcome obstacles, speed time-to-market, and gain greater customer confidence.

Here’s what you, our customers, have helped achieve and what you can expect going forward:

Innovation anchored in what matters most to you

This year, Coupa has hosted two Supply Chain Summits — one in North America and another in Europe — to bring our customer community together and examine what new ideas and approaches will best position organizations for long-term success. We also extended these opportunities for thought leadership and connection at two Gartner Supply Chain Symposiums.

Members of our customer community, including Abacentro, Adidas, Cardinal Health Care, Cargill, Coca-Cola, DB Schenker, GAF, GlaxoSmithKline, GM, Imperial Brands, Schneider Electric, Syngenta, Tyson Foods, and Unilever all contributed their insights, lessons learned, and best practices in supply chain design and implementation.

Our Spendsetter Award Winners for Supply Chain Excellence, Cargill and Syngenta, have exemplified agility in action. They’ve shown what it takes to respond rapidly and adapt their supply chains in the midst of constant change.

Customers have led and continue to lead conversations on a range of pressing, practical issues, such as: 

• Expanding supply chain modeling from narrow distribution use cases to an end-to-end model 
• Accelerating supply chain design and scenario planning through challenges and disruption 
• How to define and measure value in a supply chain design context 
• The role of good data and how it enables more effective digital replicas (or digital twins) of your supply chain. 

We’ve taken the conversations a step further for your business, opening channels between supply chain modelers and executives with teams from finance, procurement, and IT. All these conversations are guiding our innovation roadmap.

Moving end-to-end supply chain design forward with your input. Always.

From our Community Advisory Boards, to our Supply Chain Summits, to our daily conversations with you, our customers, we prioritize open channels of communication.

We’ve heard that you want to improve accuracy in demand planning. That you want to be able to get down to the tiniest level of detail with order and backlog management. That you’re frustrated when plans aren’t accurate. So we’re enhancing planning capabilities to improve design and execution of your models.

We’ve heard that you want improvements to the Supply Chain cloud platform. That you want it to be easier to use, more accessible to a broader range of people, and to have more plug-and-play options in the App Studio. We’re taking your suggestions seriously. We’re not settling. We’re working to make the cloud experience the most user-friendly, cloud-based supply chain design software that’s out there.

All these capabilities and more will be announced in upcoming releases.

Next-gen AI insights: Supply Chain Prescriptions

The average Coupa Supply Chain customer deals with hundreds of suppliers, millions of shipments, and thousands of product SKUs. Altogether, that’s about 191 billion source-product-customer combinations. Working through that data and identifying optimal logistics solutions… well, let’s say it can be a challenge.

Working with our community of supply chain modelers and executives, we co-created our AI-powered Supply Chain Prescriptions solution, which we announced at Inspire. It can cut through those 191 billion combinations and provide actionable recommendations to move your business forward. That could be node skipping, mode switching, or volume consolidation. The Coupa solution identifies opportunities for alternate manufacturing sites, supplier sites, distribution centers, and flow shifts.

Chris Hawke, Director of Supply Chain Analytics at Cardinal Health said that the solution, “has the potential to uncover new transportation spend reduction opportunities while reducing the overall load for the modeler."

Already, this solution is saving time and money for our customers. On average, in transportation expenses alone, our customers are seeing significant savings, with about 10–25% reduction in costs. And this is just the beginning. We’re already working on more ways to identify and quantify risk, and expand the capabilities of these prescriptions.

Data-driven performance with purpose: reducing emissions

All of us understand the regulatory and stakeholder expectations around Environmental, Social, and Governance issues. One of the biggest — sustainability through carbon emissions reductions — is key to supply chain leadership, especially when 90% of a company’s emissions come from its physical supply chain.

But first you need to understand where emissions are coming from, how sourcing decisions drive emissions, and that can be difficult. And you need to make the case to your executives, outlining the financial impact as well as the emissions impact.

Microsoft has leveraged this solution to take major steps forward in reducing emissions. By running scenarios and embracing digital modeling that clearly showed tradeoffs, benefits, and potential efficiency gains, Microsoft has optimized its supply chain to cut carbon emissions by 40%. That’s an achievement that has helped the company’s bottom line, as well as the planet’s long-term health.

Learn how Microsoft leveraged Coupa’s platform to reduce its carbon emissions:

As more companies embrace electric vehicles (EVs), we haven’t been resting on our laurels. In the last few months, we’ve added a capability that allows you to include EV transportation modes and charging locations so you can optimize how you use your EV fleets. And as the world continues to prioritize and regulate carbon emissions, we’ll be with you every step of the way.

Co-creating lasting success

From the start, Coupa has been a values-based company, with ensuring customer success being our first core value. What matters most to you matters most to us. You inspire us to find new ways not only to meet the challenges you face today, but also the opportunities you have for lasting success.

That’s especially true in supply chain, where we’re committed to providing excellent value for supply chain industry leaders. We will never stop striving to deliver exceptional service and support to ensure you achieve the value you’re seeking. We will continue to be relentless in supporting you to adopt and implement solutions easily and thoroughly. With our combined years of domain expertise across our team of practitioners, our commitment to developing talent and future leaders remains high.

We’re at the cusp of a new era of intelligence-powered innovation that will transform supply chain, sourcing, risk management, and every other aspect of business. And we’re delivering on that first core value of ensuring customer success.

Going forward, you can continue to expect more from Coupa. More impactful innovation. Greater expertise and support. And a stronger partnership — all focused on your success.