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Retailers Can Protect Margins and Ensure Smarter Spending With Coupa’s New Retail Solution

Coupa for Retail Streamlines Procure-to-Pay Process Across Distributed Locations

SAN MATEO, CA – Aug 3, 2011 – With uncertainty now the norm in the global economy, retailers need visibility into their non-merchandise spend to ensure predictability, protect operating margins, and ensure a consistent user experience across geographically distributed locations. Today, Coupa Software, the leading provider of disruptive and innovative cloud spend management (CSM) solutions, announced the availability of its Coupa for Retail solution, designed specifically to address the growing needs of its retail customers. Coupa for Retail provides a centralized, intuitive, and seamless approach for reducing operating expenditures and managing spend for all non-merchandising consumables.

Coupa for Retail eliminates waste in non-merchandise spend and thus significantly reduces costs as a result of some very unique capabilities:

1. Best practice approval workflow templates for retail-specific hierarchies such as store, district and headquarter. Coupa automates user management through integration with LDAP/HR systems and dynamically changes approval flows as you add or remove stores.
2. Reduce spend across complex categories such as store operations, temp labor, marketing & printing, facilities maintenance, janitorial services through visibility and using preferred suppliers.
3. Prebuilt content groups to define non-merchandise items by store, region or season. For example, use content groups to specify the type of bulbs that can be purchased by store location or the types of bags ordered according to holiday season.
4. Integration with point of sale (POS) and internal warehouse management and distribution center systems. This allows store managers to base orders on actual sales data, removing the “guess” work by employees who may not necessarily have the right skills or information to decide the order size
5. Granular budgeting capabilities that allow retailers to monitor budgets at any level — store, project, region, corporate. Now store and district managers as well as corporate executives can see how each store, region, etc. is performing real-time.

All Coupa solutions are cloud-based, thus eliminating the need for any local IT expertise or resources for support. And with a centralized dashboard that can be accessed from any Web browser at any time, Coupa for Retail’s cloud solution enables customers to manage spend more effectively.

The Coupa for Retail interface was purposefully designed to rival the simplicity and ease-of-use of leading consumer Websites today, ensuring new employees can be on-boarded quickly and seamlessly, regardless of skill level. In addition, Coupa’s solution puts an emphasis on data management, giving users the ability to designate which data is most important to track, at what time.

“The benefits of Coupa for Retail are numerous, particularly for an organization like Rent-A-Center, where demand forecasting of non-merchandise spend from store consumables to window washing is vital for our more than 3,000 plus locations,” said Mike Wilding, CPO, Rent-A-Center. “But perhaps the most important advantage of the Coupa solution has been its ease of use, even for those relatively less computer savvy employees. The technology is so intuitive and simplistic in design. This ensures a high rate of employee adoption, eliminating the need for additional investments in training programs. It’s the perfect model for retail, where turnover is historically high.”

“Each organization by itself has its own unique issues, but as an industry retailers do face similar challenges,” said Rob Bernshteyn, CEO, Coupa. “Coupa developed a solution to solve those overarching problems our customers were consistently coming up against: managing non-merchandise spend at geographically dispersed stores, little or no local IT expertise, and a high-turnover workforce, just to name a few. Coupa for Retail provides a core set of capabilities that ensure our retail customers have centralized control over procurement processes and greater visibility into spending at the store level.”

About Coupa Software
Coupa is the leading on-demand provider of solutions that control and streamline purchasing and expense management for organizations large and small. Coupa Cloud Spend Management delivers an easy to use, fast to deploy and affordable solution for requisitions, expense reporting, approval management, purchase orders, RFQs, contract compliance, inventory and invoicing, with no hardware to buy or software to license. With deep domain knowledge in e-procurement, a best-in-class cloud platform, and a fast-growing community of customers doing business with over 100,000 suppliers, Coupa enables smarter spending practices that empower companies to save money quickly. Learn more at: coupa.com or call 650.931.3200. Read more on the Coupa Blog, follow @Coupa on Twitter, or follow Coupa on LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/company/coupa-software.

 

 

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