Helping procurement and supply chain teams future-proof their businesses and reduce risk
As companies continue to wrestle with supply chain risks jeopardizing their business-critical revenue streams, Coupa Software, a leader in Business Spend Management (BSM), today announced a new solution to improve supply assurance and business continuity.
Coupa’s Supply Chain Collaboration empowers companies to avoid risk while driving profitability, increasing agility, and improving communication between buyers and suppliers. Coupa’s unified platform drives agility, transparency, and resiliency across supply chains, so products and materials are where and when they’re needed.
This new solution creates better collaboration between teams and suppliers and provides the ability to quickly assess sourcing alternatives and balance trade-offs ranging from changes to delivery dates to item quantity.
“Ensuring supply chain continuity is a top priority for businesses everywhere. We heard from companies around the globe that existing market solutions for supply chain collaboration were falling down. Forcing companies to resort to spreadsheets and emails to track critical supply that would keep factories running and retail stores operating,” said Raja Hammoud, executive vice president of products at Coupa. “Those days are over. Coupa Supply Chain Collaboration was co-innovated with the world’s leading supply chain companies to deliver modern, consumerized experiences and effortless collaboration between businesses and all their trading partners.”
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Coupa’s new Supply Chain Collaboration Suite will help businesses with purchasing, forecasting, inventory, and quality control as the suite expands. Key benefits available today include:
- Streamlined Communication: Through real-time communication supply chain planners and suppliers can easily share instant updates to quality, price, delivery dates, and more to avoid unwanted surprises or delays.
- Intuitive, Unified Approach: Integrates with ERP, MRP, and Supply Chain Planning solutions to provide a connected, unified view to all suppliers/trading partners and buyers.
- Improved Working Capital: With more predictable operations, businesses can reduce inventory carrying costs and minimize carrying excess capacity due to unplanned downtime to better optimize working capital through a single platform for direct and indirect spend.
- Increased Agility: With real-time notifications and alerts, businesses can act smarter and faster to resolve issues for direct materials without time-consuming, error-prone manual reviews.
“Supply chains are highly complex and current collaboration technologies aren’t always easy to use, leaving many businesses no choice but to rely on manual approaches and phone calls,” said Simon Ellis, Group VP at IDC. “Seamless collaboration is critical to effective supply chain management and resiliency. Organizations need full visibility into both their suppliers’ operations and their own, as well as a simple method for working together. Coupa has a history of prioritizing user adoption with easy-to-use tools to drive efficiencies and savings and this suite is no different.”
Purchase Order (PO) Collaboration, the first component of the solution that is now generally available, ensures supply assurance by providing bidirectional visibility into POs for planners and suppliers. Suppliers can confirm quantities, prices, and promise dates at a line-item level. This ensures buyers and suppliers have accurate, real-time information while automatically communicating any necessary actions. The entire purchase order lifecycle from PO generation to advanced shipping notice to receipt of goods is managed through Coupa’s platform.