Coupa Software , a leader in Business Spend Management (BSM), announced the achievement of more than 100 issued and pending patents filed with the United States Patent and Trademark Office. This milestone substantiates the company’s commitment to building the most innovative cloud platform to help businesses maximize the value of every dollar they spend with Business Spend Management.
“Innovation is core to our culture and drives our focus on delivering value to the BSM Community every day. By partnering with our community to spur new innovations, we’re helping customers maximize agility, resilience, and growth,” said Rob Bernshteyn, chairman and CEO at Coupa. “Reaching this important milestone is a demonstration of our leadership in BSM and reinforces our commitment to continuing to set the innovation agenda for the industry.”
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“We see Coupa continually co-innovating their product with their customer community while also setting the pace of innovation around Business Spend Management and following the money trail with the spend and supply base,” said Mickey North Rizza, program vice president for Enterprise Applications and Digital Commerce research practice at IDC. “IDC has evaluated Coupa’s platform many times through the years and recently named them as a leader for both capabilities and strategy in the IDC MarketScape for Procure-to-Pay.”
Coupa’s product strategy includes rapidly weaving innovation through three customer value-producing ‘waves’. Its pending and issued patents span all aspects of Coupa’s technology throughout the three waves, including:
Wave 1: Innovations in this wave help customers capture all spend through Coupa’s cloud-based, highly scalable transactional core of applications – Procurement, Invoicing, Payments, and Expenses.
Examples include:
- Search related patents utilized within Coupa Procurement deliver a consumer-like enterprise search experience for more than 50 million searches for business goods and services per year.
- Supplier collaboration patents utilized within Coupa Procurement and Invoicing that drive adoption with Supplier Actionable Notifications have helped process approximately $500 billion in business spend under management for customers.
- An Accounts Payable (AP) automation-related patent utilized within Coupa Invoicing helps to automate the coding of roughly 4 million tax lines per year, increasing tax accuracy and compliance while reducing customer effort.
- Automatic reconciliation and virtual card-related patents utilized within Coupa Pay help deliver business benefits such as saving up to $22 per paper check digitized, a significant savings opportunity considering nearly 70% of B2B volume in the U.S. is still paid by paper check.1
- Travel rebooking automation patents utilized within Coupa Travel and Expense have helped companies automatically rebook billions of dollars in travel reservations; reducing travel costs by rebooking when prices drop between the time of booking and the time of travel.
- A patent for automated processing of suggested translated terms is utilized across the Coupa BSM Platform and helps deliver user-centric experiences that capture spending across the globe with more than 16,000+ user submitted translations across 59 locales.
Wave 2: Innovations in this wave help customers optimize every dollar spent by leveraging comprehensive Suite Synergy within the Coupa platform, where power user applications and the transactional core connect with each other to break down silos and deliver better spend visibility, control, and compliance.
Examples include:
- Contract audit and historical pricing related patents utilized in synergies across Coupa Contracts and Coupa Procurement have helped contribute to the operationalizing of purchasing contracts.
- A patent for determining supply chain paths and duty costs utilized within Coupa Supply Chain Design and Planning improves complex supply chain models when millions of path permutations and hundreds of thousands of duty taxes need to be modeled.
- An allocation modeling patent utilized within Coupa Sourcing Optimization has been applied to hundreds of billions of dollars in sourcing events spanning complex categories such as transportation and logistics to help customers analyze options and optimize their spending.
- A machine representation and tracking of contract terms patent utilized within Coupa Contract Lifecycle Management enables the Coupa community to implement thousands of automated workflows, operational triggers, and risk flags. Since creation, this innovation has also saved tens of thousands of hours of manual work to update contract records manually, delivering vast efficiency savings.
- A real-time transaction analysis patent utilized within Coupa Spend Guard has contributed to the analysis and protection of billions of dollars in business spend.
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Wave 3: Innovations in this wave help Coupa amplify the value for each BSM customer through an industry-unique model that applies AI to aggregated, normalized, and anonymized customer community data.
Examples include:
- An AI-based data classification patent is utilized to deliver community related supplier risk insights. The solution has contributed to the analysis of more than 7 million suppliers in the Coupa supplier community.
- An automatic synchronization of payment data patent is utilized to help suppliers more easily manage their payment account data across the Coupa community. Suppliers set their data once and Coupa automatically applies it in various business processes such as supplier information management and supplier invoicing.
- Automated data extraction and identification patents automatically consume data and incorporate it in a community-based templating model that helps reduce invoice processing errors and remove manual data entry.
- A supplier consolidation patent is utilized to analyze more than 7 million suppliers and deliver community-based commodity insights such as analyzing category spend based on transaction classification, identifying top suppliers in the community, and providing prescriptions to consolidate or diversify suppliers.
“Coupa is constantly innovating on behalf of its community,” said Jaime Robles, chief procurement officer at Casey’s General Store. “Not only do they listen to and address customer feedback, as customers we feel truly part of the innovation process. We are confident that new features and capabilities added to Coupa’s BSM platform with each new release bring real value to our spend management processes.”
Coupa’s patent program works with employees throughout the full lifecycle of ideation, with patentable technology included in each of Coupa’s three major software releases per year.
“Our ethos for innovation is: None of us is as smart as all of us,” said Raja Hammoud, executive vice president of products at Coupa. “We believe that novel ideas can come from anywhere, that creativity should be fostered, and that the best approach to problem-solving is through collaborative, diverse perspectives. We encourage everyone at Coupa, across all levels and departments, to become an inventor as part of our patent program.”
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