Daily Archives: July 11, 2017

Coupa + Trade Extensions = ??? … Part I

Back in May, the doctor indicated that at some point after Inspire he’d do a deep dive into the acquisition of Trade Extensions by Coupa. He waited as he wanted to think more on the possibilities and probabilities and get more insight into the potential, but as no additional insight appears to be coming in the short term, we’re going to summarize where things are at now, from the perspective of a SWOT analysis.

Coupa Strengths

  • Pure SaaS
  • Extremely easy to use tactical e-Procurement/P2P Solution
  • Compliant e-Invoicing in 30 Countries
  • Open Business Network
  • Integrated Expense Management … on the go
  • Integrated Budgeting
Trade Extension Strengths

  • Pure SaaS
  • Easy to use optimization-backed Strategic Sourcing Platform
  • Most powerful decision optimization platform on the market
  • Extremely powerful fact sheets for upload, verification, and analysis
  • Extensive formula and modelling support to support any category and modelling needs
  • The TESS Academy
Coupa Weaknesses

  • Integration to On-Site Systems is Limited
    (the API is great for integration to other SaaS solutions)
  • Integrated RFX/Auction support is extremely limited, no BoM support
  • Community Intelligence is limited to what is pushed through the platform
  • Large Supplier Network, but limited intelligence on reliability, sustainability, and risk
    (the Riskopy acquisition will hopefully improve the situation over time)
  • Well suited for Tail Spend, but no built-in help identifying categories that should be strategically sourced
  • Contract Management is very limited
  • Focus on just pushing spend through the platform to increase SUM detracts from value-generation opportunities
Trade Extension Weaknesses

  • Out-of-the-Box integration to other systems is extremely limited
  • No repository of out-of-the-box models for standard categories
  • Contract Management is very limited
  • No auto-classification, initial cube construction requires expertise and elbow-grease
  • No Supplier Information Management or integration with an SXM platform

Come back tomorrow where we discuss the opportunities and threats.