3 Ways Community Intelligence Helps Digitize Supplier Relationships
Coupa’s Business Spend Management (BSM) platform is built on the foundation of a large and growing community. Our cloud-native platform uses the power of community and data to guide finance, procurement, and supply chain teams to unlock hidden value from traditionally manual processes. Coupa Community Intelligence applies artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) to over $4 trillion of Coupa community spend data from over 2,000 customers and 7 million suppliers. These insights enable businesses to optimize spend-under-management, reduce risk, and improve efficiency across the board.
Keep reading to learn more about the 3 main ways community intelligence empowers businesses to confidently and quickly take their supplier relationships digital.
1. Community intelligence helps companies achieve 70% supplier adoption faster through AI-powered supplier matching.
Achieving 70% supplier adoption is an important tipping point. When companies can swiftly reach a point of 70% supplier adoption, they are better positioned to convey the value of a BSM platform to internal stakeholders as well as suppliers. Overcoming any skepticism or resistance is easier when you can show the value in real time.
Coupa’s AI-powered platform can conduct an automated match between customer supplier lists, which often reach to the tens of thousands, and over 7 million suppliers already on the Coupa platform. This shows who is already transacting digitally across Coupa’s extensive community of 2,000+ customers, and it provides companies with valuable insights about how to prioritize supplier outreach efforts.
2. Risk and sustainability insights are easier to access in real-time. This helps companies develop their supply bases for longstanding success.
Our BSM strategy leverages community data as a tool that helps companies identify new suppliers and allows for real-time supplier risk monitoring.
Following these prescriptions enables procurement teams to search for community-trusted suppliers using criteria including commodities supplied, ship-to countries, CSR data, ratings, and more. Selecting suppliers who are already transacting digitally with the Coupa community avoids barriers to digital adoption. Automated insights allow businesses to quickly identify diverse, and trusted, suppliers for a sustainable supply chain.
3. AI-powered insights allow for AP automation, even for digital holdouts. This frees up resources for more valuable work.
Replacing manual accounts payable processes with a fully integrated invoicing and digital payments suite significantly reduces manual paper processing and low-value work in the back office. While Coupa makes it extremely easy for new suppliers to get started, there may still be resistance to change. Finance teams can receive a PO by email and click a link to digitally create a matching invoice, with no fees or contracts to sign. Coupa’s InvoiceSmash capabilities use AI to automatically and accurately extract full header and line-level data from PDF invoices emailed by suppliers. Maximizing digital adoption equips finance leaders with the opportunity to redeploy their resources towards more strategic work that can further aid company agility and profitability.
Furthermore, Coupa’s AI-based fraud detection draws on Coupa’s pool of community spend data to detect suspicious behavior patterns across customers’ spend, so businesses can audit questionable transactions before they are paid. This helps avoid losses to fraud without requiring auditors to work overtime.
Community Intelligence is vital for successful business spend management transformation
Community Intelligence is one of the greatest advantages of utilizing an integrated BSM platform to manage spending and purchasing across the business. AI-driven capabilities and ease of use empower companies and their suppliers to adopt a digital system and quickly drive value. When companies achieve success in digital invoicing, the other benefits of digitizing supplier relationships follow. Pre-approved spend, on-contract spend, and savings soar.
Coupa prioritizes supplier success and provides full supplier enablement services that ensure a seamless and fast journey to the full digitization of business spend processes.
The formula for supplier and business success is simple:
Best-Practice Process + Capable Technology + Community Intelligence = Success
