fifty fifty landing hero Mobile Image

Create Margin Impact with Strategic Sourcing

With strategic sourcing software, you can deliver solutions designed around your business, improve sourcing productivity, and integrate sourcing into your procurement ecosystem to accelerate time-to-value, drive savings, and increase overall efficiencies.

sourcing-hero-zone-1280396610

Turn paper savings into cash savings

Cut-the-time-spent-on-research-resized

Identify opportunities in less time

Stay proactive and cut the time spent on research with complete spend visibility. Get automatic suggestions — such as large in-flight requisitions and contracts nearing expiration. Browse thousands of pre-rated, pre-enabled suppliers or filter by diversity status, ratings, geography, and more.

Sourcing-Summary-Analytics-1-resized

Get cross-platform spend visibility

Gain unprecedented visibility into all your company’s spend, whether it’s managed through Coupa, your ERP, or other systems. With complete visibility, you can spot new opportunities and take advantage of your full spending power in supplier negotiations.

Learn More
Simplify-Decisions-resized

Simplify routine sourcing events

Coupa’s intuitive, user-friendly experience empowers employees to easily set up routine sourcing events from templates, collect supplier bids, and collaborate anywhere on any device to quickly make decisions.

Optimize-complex-events-resized

Manage strategic awards and complex categories

Manage moderate-to-extremely complex strategic awards and categories with events that scale to model complex business requirements and categories. Use advanced mathematical optimization techniques to let buyers run multiple scenarios with ease, use expressive bidding, and work more flexibly with suppliers to enable better negotiations and prices.

Learn More
Risk-Manager-Approval-Workflow-resized

Simplify and improve regulatory and policy compliance

Ensure bidders are vetted according to your company’s third-party risk management policies. Promote company initiatives including diversity and corporate social responsibility by capturing required information from bidders and incorporating into award criteria.

Learn More
Act-on-award-resized

Easily connect sourcing with contracting and buying

Ensure the pricing and terms of your awards are fully captured so that end users across the company can immediately start benefiting from your work. Systematically validate supplier invoices against contracted bid terms to increase value capture.

Learn More
sourcing-supply-chain-design-planning-1387035362

A perfect match: Sourcing + Supply Chain Design & Planning

Connect sourcing with supply chain planning to respond faster to market dynamics by improving collaboration between supply chain planners and sourcing professionals. Pass planning decisions to sourcing for immediate action and capture bid information to feed market price assumptions in planning.

sourcing-supplier-management-1331350008

Created to connect: Sourcing + Supplier Management

Pre-vet suppliers before you source. With Coupa, supplier risk and performance data is always readily accessible across the sourcing process. Use information such as supplier risk ratings, performance, and ESG criteria to help inform which suppliers to add to an event and streamline how you construct scenarios for awards.

sourcing-contract-management-procurement-944060504

Better together: Sourcing + Contract Management + Procurement

Accelerate value delivered from sourcing events by seamlessly converting awards into contracts and catalogs used for purchasing and invoice validation. Tight connections with buying enable automatic creation of spot buys based on rules to simplify tail spend management and free up sourcing resources.

FAQs

How does strategic sourcing usually work?

Generally speaking, the traditional strategic sourcing approach starts with identifying opportunities through spend analysis and classification. This is followed by sourcing categories that surpass certain predefined spend and volume thresholds (or both), as well as categories that are identified with potential future importance.

Then, critically, negotiated value is codified by creating contracts that are linked to transactions. In ideal situations, these contracts would result in all the negotiated savings being “realized” as spend occurs. However, strategic sourcing is not immune to common procurement challenges such as rogue contracts or spend. That’s why it’s essential to combine strategic sourcing with effective visibility and management of transactional spend is critical.

Does strategic sourcing handle high-spend and low dollar-value categories in the same way?

Large enterprises today have thousands of categories to source and procure. With the reality of limited resources, all companies prioritize sourcing activities. Automation of tail spend contracts, combined with routine sourcing events, address standardized low dollar-value categories. Advanced sourcing events address high-spend and critical categories.

However, this approach results in a large set of categories being ignored or sourced too infrequently, which likely leaves money on the table. These categories represent a lucrative opportunity to capture additional value. This large set of spend categories can be optimized with externally managed community sourcing events, which are professionally run events that aggregate spend from multiple organizations.

What does community sourcing do that strategic sourcing might not?

Using strategic sourcing software, community sourcing connects businesses that have common purchasing needs to work together and use the group’s combined spend volume and sourcing expertise for group events.

There are three distinct benefits of community sourcing: capture savings, reduce workloads, and optimize quality and terms.

The value of community sourcing for procurement professionals also includes making new peer connections and gaining access to expertise outside of the organization. Many sourcing veterans find collaborating via community sourcing programs leads to new insights as well as inspiration.

Request a demo

Learn why the world’s biggest brands trust Coupa to improve margins and grow their business.

Chat with Coupa

Ready to switch to the #1 AI Total Spend Management platform?