Setting a Resolution for Growth in 2020

How Mid-Sized Companies Using NetSuite ERP Manage Growth and Scale Massively with Coupa

It’s that time of year when we’re making – or working at keeping – resolutions that will get us where we want to go. And where do mid-sized companies want to go? They want to scale massively and grow into $1 billion-plus enterprises. Are you a member of this club?

Setting a Resolution for Growth in 2020: Combine Coupa and NetSuite ERP to Stay Ahead.
Great, good work. The resolution is made. But making a resolution is easy. How we keep them is the hard part. So, how will you keep your resolution for massive growth in the year ahead? We’ve got some ideas to share on this.

First, let’s talk about the tech that most mid-sized companies have grown to rely on to manage our growing businesses. What’s that for your company? Did you say your ERP? Good, because a key piece to meeting our resolution is how ERP solutions – like NetSuite, SAP Ariba, and Oracle ERPs – can be enhanced with additional functionality and capabilities that enable small and mid-size businesses to scale to the enterprise level. 

For example, mid-sized NetSuite customers experiencing rapid growth confront some predictable challenges as they scale. Many struggle to keep up with rapid expansion in purchases, suppliers, and invoices, often due to a lack of visibility or relying on manual processes. As operations accelerate, Finance and IT teams can be overwhelmed by the pace of growth. Slowing down to get things under control is out of the question. For procurement, the lack of company-wide spend visibility and control results in missed savings – dollars that could have been reinvested to fuel growth, innovation, and profitability, but are now long gone.

Some high-growth companies that use NetSuite ERP are learning how to face down these challenges and get on top of the scaling juggernaut. According to Forrester Research, there's an ongoing trend of enterprises with a multi-vendor cloud infrastructure solving these types of problems by extending their core ERP systems with specialized SaaS solutions, like the Coupa Business Spend Management (BSM) Platform.

The challenges of growth when only relying on your ERP
As small companies grow into mid-sized companies, finance teams often suffer from limited visibility into corporate spend – all the way from ordering through invoice processing to supplier payment. Companies that have adopted cloud-based ERP systems have a strong foundation to manage the growing business, but many end-users find these tools so cumbersome and difficult to use that they just don’t use them. The reality is that users simply go around or avoid systems that are difficult to use. Lack of adoption becomes endemic. 

For many mid-sized businesses, chronic budget overruns make it difficult to stick to a financial plan. Not knowing what the business has spent until after the fact puts accounting teams -- and the business -- in a precarious position. Manual procure-to-pay processes strain overworked finance teams. This leads to accounting staff spending excessive time on accruals, resulting in delays in closing the books. Meanwhile, the controller often ends up hounding the business to cut programs to get back on budget. 

Coupa makes NetSuite even better with visibility into and control over spend
In order to take financial operations to the next level, growing mid-sized companies need real-time visibility into procurement and spend with a solution that is easy for both employees and suppliers intuitive to learn and easy to use. 

The Coupa BSM platform natively integrates with cloud ERP systems like NetSuite, extending your traditional ERP solution to include spend management capabilities from e-invoicing and expenses to sourcing and purchase requests. Working together, Coupa and NetSuite have invested in the integration of their cloud platforms, enabling NetSuite users to leverage the power of Coupa’s intuitive user interface and cloud-native platform. Coupa is “Built for NetSuite” certified, meaning that Coupa is able to connect to NetSuite quickly (often within one day) using pre-built NetSuite connectors. This allows you to spend less time building and maintaining technical integrations, and more time focused on keeping your resolution to grow and scale effectively.

A platform that increases your agility and ability to scale massively
Growing mid-sized businesses have plenty to worry about. Growth leads to a rapid expansion in invoices, expenses, and purchases, and without efficient processes and end-to-end visibility you’ve got yourself a recipe for trouble. Coupa’s ongoing platform innovation helps you continually improve end-to-end AP and procure-to-pay processes, getting you ahead of the innovation curve rather than waiting for IT logjams. Coupa enables process automation that frees up your team’s time for higher-value work, allowing you to scale aggressively without having to throw headcount at the problem. 

For more on how Coupa helps NetSuite ERP enterprises manage rapid growth, get our eBook, 6 Tips for NetSuite Customers to Scale for Massive Growth.

NetSuite is a strong supporter of the joint solution, demonstrating the company's commitment by becoming a Coupa reseller. According to Zach Nelson, NetSuite CEO: "We believe this relationship can bring immense value to our joint customers. They can now take advantage of the benefits of both Coupa and NetSuite to help their employees easily purchase all of their goods and services, including indirect goods, anywhere, regardless of the device those customers are using – be it a smartphone, tablet, or personal computer." 

Stay in control, on budget, and meet your resolutions
Coupa provides NetSuite users with complete spend visibility across the entire enterprise. Executive dashboards and alerts provide real-time visibility and actionable intelligence to effectively control spending and stay on budget. Machine learning and AI provide you with intelligent information that allows you to direct accounting to review and audit transactions and reports that are most likely out of compliance, incorrect, or fraudulent.

Coupa’s real-time KPI benchmarking and community intelligence inform you how to optimize and improve your spend based on comparing your performance against key performance indicators of other mid-sized organizations like yours. This not only gives you strategic intelligence to improve operations, it also provides you with the hard data to prove Coupa’s impact to others in your organization.

Get the financial agility you need to grow in uncertain times
From smarter procurement, invoicing, expenses, and payments to sourcing and spend analysis, Coupa augments your ERP system with the only business spend management platform that makes it easy for everyone in your organization to maximize the value of every dollar spent. All in all, adding Coupa to your NetSuite ERP gives you what you need to manage the massive growth your mid-sized business is looking for in 2020. Good luck. Happy New Year.

Contact us to learn more.

Kelly Casey is Marketing Program Manager at Coupa Software. She holds a B.A. from Arizona State University and resides in the San Francisco bay area.

Adam Fleischer is a regular contributor to the Coupa blog. He holds an MBA from Stanford University and lives amongst the redwood trees in the Santa Cruz Mountains.