Is Finance Ready to Reap the Benefits of BSM?
Pause if you will for just a moment and think about the spend management environment a dozen years ago. The iPhone had not yet been invented. Amazon’s e-commerce juggernaut was just beginning to go into hyperdrive. The word “google” had recently been added to the dictionary as a transitive verb, and the term “cloud computing” had been newly coined to describe a future in which all business software would move to the internet.
On-premise ERP systems reigned supreme. If you wanted something besides your ERP procurement, expenses, or invoicing modules, you might buy a best-of-breed point solution. You’d probably consider the same if you wanted a solution in sourcing, contract management, supplier information management, and the other related areas.
That was about the state of spend management when Coupa got going. Our company gained traction by bringing the ease of use of modern cloud technology to procurement, and then began to seize upon the much larger and broader opportunity of bringing spending through the procurement, invoicing, and expense processes together in one unified platform, eventually adding a host of additional power user tools into the mix.
We are now in the era of what we now call BSM – Business Spend Management – a holistic, user-centric approach to company spending. With all spending transactions flowing into one plaform, leading organizations are now poised to use technologies such as analytics, machine learning, and community intelligence to transform the ways they spend money. And, it is imperative that they do so.
A soon-to-be-released study that Coupa sponsored in collaboration with the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU) titled, “The Strategic CFO in a Rapidly Changing World,” unveils the challenges that CFOs face and the important work that must be done to realize the benefits of BSM.
The Economist Intelligence Unit spoke to some of the brightest minds in finance around the globe, surveying more than 500 CFOs and VPs of finance at companies of all sizes in a variety of industries. Together, we have synthesized this data into a series of insights about how finance leaders can guide their companies. We’ll be sharing the findings at Coupa Inspire next week.
We look forward to seeing you there, and hearing your thoughts, insights and strategies, both at Inspire and in the weeks and months to come. And if you haven’t yet registered for Inspire, please consider doing so here.
