Category Archives: SaaS

Maybe Coupa Should Build a Coupe

I recently gave Coupa a bit of a chastising in a recent series (Part I, Part II, and Part III) for failing to impress me with the rate of innovation ever since Dave Stephens left, as it looks like they’ve spent most of the last year developing flash (UI) and not substance (functionality).

But maybe that would be the right strategy for Coupa. Let’s look at the reality. There’s a large market out there consisting of companies (mostly mid-size, but some large and small) that have never used anything resembling a (modern) e-Sourcing or e-Procurement solution. At most of these companies, they don’t even know the difference between e-Sourcing and e-Procurement. All they know is Google and Amazon, which we all know are not the F-350’s of the B2B world.

At these companies, something that looks like an Amazon, searches like a Google, and connects like a Facebook goes over well. (After all, they’re not cricketers, and don’t know the perfect recipe for B2B canard a l’orange.) They don’t know that real e-Sourcing involves sophisticated analysis and negotiation techniques or that real e-Procurement is actually a nine-step process built around time-tested best practices to insure that the organization orders the right product at the right time in the right quantity off the right contract at the right price. They still think that ordering office suppliers and commodity electronics online is B2B e-Procurement. Forget about the fact that some of the old-time sourcing pros are claiming that strategic sourcing is dead, these companies haven’t even progressed far enough along the commerce curve to know what strategic sourcing is!

In other words, this market has no idea why it needs an F-350 work horse, and would thrilled to be getting a Chevy Cobalt. If Coupa adopts a keep-it-simple strategy, instances of their platform will sell like hot cakes, and Coupa will do great, as long as they don’t discover that there’s a major fault in the power steering five years down the road after almost one million (1M) seats have been sold.

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FieldGlass is Determined To Take Off In the Tens

FieldGlass, which provides a unified platform for contingent workforce management, service provider management, and direct hires, is determined to tear forward through the tens, which also happen to correspond to its second decade of corporate existence. Founded in Chicago in 1999, it celebrated its tenth birthday with a bang by adding 33 new customers in 2009 before tearing into 2010 and adding over 30 new customers year-to-date to double its customer base in less than two years.

With localized support for sixty-three (63) countries and counting, over one third (33%) of the new customers it has added in the past year were from outside the US — and they expect this number to rise over time as they add more satellite offices in various countries and continue to add localized support for more countries. And like Coupa, which happens to be one of the many enterprise platforms their solution can peacefully exist with, they plan to keep up the fervant pace of customer acquisition for some time to come.

So how are they pulling this off? It’s a combination of

  • persistence like the little engine that could, they just won’t quit,
  • technology they have a solid platform which gets better every year,
  • limited competition Google might return over 100K hits for contingent workforce management, but only a few players (like IQ Navigator and Taleo) have platforms in the same class,
  • a truly global focus their localized support (which includes local laws, regulation, and policy) for 63 countries and counting is a differentiator, and
  • the economy since no one wants to hire direct full time employees anymore.

So what have they done since our last update last April (which followed the incredibly deep coverage brought to us by the Sourcing Maniacs in their 2008 vendor tour)? Two things of note: they finished flushing out their core BI suite and started working on Active Guidance. And while the latter is still in its infancy, it will be very useful when taken to the next level.

Their BI offering consists of three core capabilities:

  • intelligent benchmarkingacross equivalent job categories in equivalent locations,
  • drill down reporting which lets the user drill through the various spend cubes maintained by the application, and
  • visualization which presents the user with innovative graphs, comparative dashboards, and informative trends.

Most of the work has went into improving the benchmarks, to make sure the industry averages presented are for equivalent jobs in equivalent locales, and extending the visualizer, to try and find the best ways to present a lot of information in an easy to understand, but yet impactive, manner. In a few cases, they’ve really hit the mark. The first case is the country-based graphs which allow a user to see relative spending by state on a geographically correct map. These graphs take the concept of Shneiderman diagrams (or visual crosstabs) to a whole new level. The second case is the integrated trend graphs that allow you to simultaneously see the trends across contingent worker, service worker, and direct hire for any job position or category. This is important because whenever spending drops sharply in one category, it tends to increase significantly in another. (Can’t hire any new workers? Service workers. Can’t sign another long term contract with a service provider? Contingent workers. Contingent workers been here too long? New hires.) The third case is the comparative rate-range graphs which simultaneously present the average rate, the range, and the market average for a set of related positions — it makes it really to easy to see where the company is likely spending too much for its contingent and service labor.

However, what is really interesting is their new focus on “active guidance”. Having deep insight from meaningful benchmarks and comprehensive spend reports is one thing, but knowing what to do — and when to do it — is another. For an organization with thousands of contingent and service workers, this can be a challenge. To this end FieldGlass has launched new capabilities that is has bundled under the heading of “active guidance” with more in development. The three capabilities it has launched to date are:

  • Rate Guidanceusing the benchmark data and spending history, the platform will advise the user on the recommended rate range to associate with a contingent or service position,
  • FieldGlass Advisorbuilt on top of their alert functionality, the advisor will let a user know when a certain action should be taken (such as initiating a request for additional funds or to extend a current position), and
  • The Project Management Office Dashboarda quick summary into the past due, current, and forthcoming tasks that require the users attention with respect to payment and procurement, the dashboard is built on top of dozens of user configurable thresholds relating to processes, documents, and spend tracked by the system.

As FieldGlass continues its quest to automatically identify trends and associate them with suggested behaviors,this role-based feature should get quite interesting. The holy grail of performance analysis lies in the ability to take tactical data and derive meaningful strategy.

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Has Coupa Settled on a Coupe? Part III

In our first post, we discussed how, when Davie ran The Coupa Factory, their strategy was innovation focussed and they were constantly charging ahead in their efforts to bring Procurement Independence to the masses but that, lately, it seems that their strategy has shifted to putting customer acquisition first and building a better platform second. In our last post, we reviewed what they have accomplished over the past eighteen months, which isn’t too shabby to say the least (especially compared to some of their peers which do not appear to have innovated at all), but noted that there’s nothing to really shake your foundations … which is a shame considering that had Coupa taken benchmarking and supplier ratings to the next level, they could have knocked your Procurement socks off. This is the subject of this post.

In order for benchmarks to be useful, they have to be meaningful. In order for a comparison to be meaningful, it has to be against like items. And while you can compare apples to oranges, unless you’re comparing the spectra of dried samples in powdered form, it doesn’t make sense. The reality is that savings, request, order, and invoice metrics only make sense if the comparison is against a similar company of a similar size in a similar vertical buying similar products. Consider free-form requests … depending on company size that’s going to range from hundreds per year to tens of thousands per year. Frequency of self-approval … that’s not only going to depend on corporate policies but the types of goods being purchased. If the system is mainly used to purchase office supplies, who’s going to waste time approving every small order? But if the system is being used to buy high priced electronics, different story. PO value will not only vary widely between companies, but within a company. A purchase order for a weekly office supplies order in a small company will be a fraction of a purchase order for a new set of servers. Active suppliers will vary widely depending upon the size of the company and how many different types of products are being bought. Had Coupa defined appropriate verticals, segmented the verticals into appropriate sizes, and insured that the metrics were meaningful (even if that meant waiting until there were more customers in some verticals), this could have been extremely useful. However, right now, it’s interesting at best, and could be dangerous if misunderstood.

In order for supplier rankings to be useful, they have to be against meaningful metrics, and those rankings need to be defined by a majority of affected users. If they are random rankings defined by random users against random products, they are not very useful, especially if they are done by users who have only used the supplier’s products once and not users who have to work with the supplier and its products every day. In order to truly rank a supplier, a company needs to insure that all of the relevant users who use the supplier’s products or services regularly or who interact with the supplier as part of their role rank the supplier. This means that the buyer needs to send out mandatory surveys to these users. While a buyer can easily send out a survey through your standard SIM or e-Negotiation tool, what a buyer normally can’t do through these tools is figure out which organizational users are in the best position to rate the supplier. However, as Coupa enables all spend related to a supplier to be captured in the system, it’s a pretty easy query to figure out which buyers are the biggest user’s of a supplier’s products and which buyers should be ranking the suppliers. If Coupa had enabled the construction of supplier performance surveys which could be sent to the regular users of the supplier’s products in a single click, and then made it impossible for a buyer to requisition anything until the mandatory survey was completed, think of how useful it could be. However, right now, like benchmarking, it’s interesting, but not very useful.

Hopefully these oversights are just the result of Coupa going through the growing pains associated with a brand new management team and rapid customer acquisition. When you consider that The Coupa Sunflower was only starting to blossom, it would be nice to see Coupa return to the days when its releases were much more than coupacetic. After all, why should they settle for a coupe when they can build a dragster? It only takes a little bit of innovation in the right direction to bring back the excitement to Coupa Time.

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Has Coupa Settled on a Coupe? Part II

In our last post we discussed how, when Davie ran The Coupa Factory, their strategy was innovation focussed and they were constantly charging ahead in their efforts to bring Procurement Independence to the masses. However, lately, it seems that Coupa‘s strategy has shifted from “build a better platform and they will come” to “get the customer and then build them a better platform”. While not much of a change, it’s a change nonetheless and it appears to have affected their rate of innovation. Furthermore, it has been accompanied by a shift from groundbreaking new features to even flashier UIs, iPhone apps, and streamlined ERP integration. [Either that, or they’ve been celebrating all those new customer wins with The Coupa Drinking Song. ] While these features are important to the tactical buyer, they don’t add value to the strategic parts of the procurement process.

This isn’t to say that Coupa has stopped developing, or that some of their new features aren’t impressive, especially where the average buyer is concerned, but that their rate of innovation for the last year and a half just doesn’t compare to the Coupa of old. And while it is to be expected that the rate of innovation will drop as a company matures, if the rate drops too fast, the company risks going stagnant, and that would be troubling. However, what is really troublesome is that Coupa hit upon two areas in real need of innovation in their latest release, but appear to have completely missed the point on how to bring that desperately needed innovation to the masses (unless it’s still a work in progress, but why not go for the big win before anyone else beats you to the finish line?). However, that’s the subject of our next post.

For now, let’s review what they have accomplished in their latest release, as a few of the features are quite useful and still unique to the space.

Drag-and-Drop Expense Management

One of the developments Coupa seems quite proud of is the ability to snap a photo of a receipt with your iPhone, e-mail it to your Coupa account, log in to the system, bring up expense reporting, and then drag it to an expense category in an expense report. The receipt is immediately associated with the report and removed from your unprocessed receipt bucket.

Transaction Metadata for OLAP reporting

Coupa has added transaction metadata to each transaction that provides supervisors and CPOs the ability to roll up reports by chart of accounts, reporting hierarchy, and category. They’ve also added more fine grained security to insure that a user can only see spend within her visibility. (Note that they were calling this “data striping“, which, of course has nothing to do with OLAP reporting but data storage on physical mediums as it is the technique, used in RAID, of segmenting logically sequential data across different devices. So if you were confused, this is what they meant.)

Real-time Budget-Based Alerts

Not only does the application allow a user to keep on top of her budget, by way of it’s budget dashboard on the home screen (which is actually useful as most buyers don’t have a clue how much they are spending), but if a requisition puts a user over a certain percentage of her budget too early in the year, the application will alert the user, and the approver before it is approved. It will also let the approver know if the requisition would put the category or department budget over a dangerous (administrator configurable) threshold too early in the year.

iRequest

iRequest is a bookmarklet (bookmark app) that allows the user to add a bookmark to their browser that will bring up a pop-up window that will let them request whatever item is on the page of the external site she is browsing. Not only does it make requesting an item on Amazon.com a breeze, but it eliminates the excuse for out-of-system requisitioning as every item can now be easily requested through the system.

Opt-in Benchmarking

With opt-in benchmarking, a customer can opt-in to sharing benchmarking data anonymously and see how it is performing on a standardized set of benchmarks relative to all of the other customers on the Coupa system. It’s interesting, and could be a powerful tool, but right now, it’s not very useful. More on this in our next post.

Supplier Ratings

With this feature, they’ve essentially added the ratings feature of Amazon.com which allows a buyer to rate the supplier with respect to each purchase, but since the ratings are optional, and since they’re not made against meaningful performance categories, the usefulness of this feature is rather limited.

All-in-all, some useful functionality that I’m sure will go far in convincing the average office manager to accept Coupa with open arms and joy in her heart, but not what Coupa could have delivered to totally knock your Procurement socks off. More on this in our next post.

To be concluded.

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Has Coupa Settled on a Coupe? Part I

Has Coupa, which opened the Cabana Cafe a little over four years ago with the goal of enabling Procurement Independence for all with it’s Rails-driven cloud-based EC2 platform, given up its quest for a coupasonic flying car and instead settled for a mini-cooper?

Now, while the original goal of Coupa, that wanted to fill your e-Procurement gas tank, was to bring e-Procurement to the masses, it would seem that they are now content with the fact that you can buy anything you want in The Coupa Store as it would appear that they are no longer charging ahead on the innovation front. While it’s true that they’ve been quite busy ever since they enabled QuickDraw Procurement with QuickStart, what they’ve accomplished since then isn’t all that spectacular compared to their historical rate of innovation … and they’ve missed most of the opportunities for innovation that could take their platform to the next level with their latest release. And while it’s true that you don’t need a very powerful solution if you’re selling fertilizer to farmers (and can get by with a simple cart and a good old-fashioned hoe-down), you’re never going to get the design engineers. (i.e. You’ll get the tactical buyers requisitioning office supplies, but never the strategic buyers trying to order a bill of materials for engineering.)

Basically, besides revamping the UI for the upteenth time (which seems to be a waste of resources to me as it was already [among] the easiest enterprise procurement solution out there and as easy to use as Amazon.com), all Coupa appears to have accomplished in the last eighteen months is:

  • improved ERP integration through upgraded APIs and Boomi,
  • drag-and-drop expense management,
  • transaction metadata for OLAP reporting,
  • a new inline spend dashboard,
  • real-time budget-based alerts during requisitioning,
  • the iPhone app,
  • iRequest,
  • opt-in community benchmarking, and
  • supplier ratings.

Considering that:

  • they’ve had APIs since day one, Boomi handles most of the integration, and ERP integration is always just a matter of time and resources,
  • it’s about data capture (not slick UIs),
  • they’ve had the ability to capture this data since day one,
  • dashboards are dangerous and dysfunctional,
  • they’ve always had alerts and the usefulness of this should have been obvious years ago,
  • if you have an iPhone, you have e-mail, and that’s good enough for approvals,
  • the goal is not to buy outside the system,
  • benchmarks are pointless unless you’re benchmarking against peer data, and
  • optional surveys are about as useful as snowshoes in summer

while it is still forward progress (which is more than a few of their peers can claim these days), it really isn’t much considering their historical rate of innovation. (Of course, that’s when Davie ran The Coupa Factory.) While their new strategy may have enabled their rate of growth to skyrocket, going from a few dozen customers to over one hundred and fifty in under two years, it appears to have put a crimp in their rate of innovation — especially considering the unprecedented power Coupa could have brought to their platform if they had taken the last two features to the next level.

To be continued.

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