Archive for August, 2007

We’re excited to announce the general availability of our open source project, Coupa e-Procurement Express v1.5. In addition to the team here,many thanks to several people in the Coupa community that helped us with QA, documentation and get the word out.

We heard many of your requests over the last several months and which helped to shape the v1.5 release. As promised, there are a ton of new capabilities which are listed here. Some of the most hotly desired features include:

• Multi-currency support
• Self-approvals
• Purchase order change and revisioning
• Improved tables and searching
• CSV catalog upload

Of course, you can download the application today, which is now just the source code. We strongly encourage you to post your comments, experiences, suggestions, flames, etc. on our Forums. We’ll be sending out Coupa T-shirts to our active posters.

Noah

Ben Worthen offered a post on WSJ’s Business Technology blog challenging the conventional wisdom that investing in a wall-to-wall ERP system improves corporate agility. He cites an article published in the MIT Sloan Management Review. A few interesting points:

• 75% of ERP projects are rated as “failures” by the organizations that undertook them
• The average company spends $15 million or more on the overall project
• IT departments then spend 70-80% of their yearly budget maintaining their existing systems

If those facts and figures don’t scare the hell out of any CEO or CFO considering undertaking a new system I’m not sure what will. It’s yet another data point suggesting simple point solutions, often offered on-demand, are a much lower risk and lower cost approach to streamlining business operations.

For mega-corporations like Walmart preferred supplier programs obviously ensure consistency and generate gigantic savings. Yet small and mid-sized businesses can benefit from them also. So if you don’t have an active program, here are some reasons to consider starting one:

• [A preferred supplier program] Results in part standardization, and that lowers hidden costs
• Increases your ability to invest in supplier relationships (and that usually results in advice and guidance that improves purchase value and/or total cost)
• Trains the organization on disciplined buying behaviors
• Decreases cycle times over the long haul as employees do not need to do independent research on market offerings and prices

Perhaps you are looking to implement your first e-Procurement system – perhaps you are looking to tune your existing system. Wherever you are on the journey towards more effective Purchasing, consider implementing a preferred supplier program. It’s a smart move, even if you’re not Walmart.

We’ve transitioned our blog over to Wordpress from Mephisto (a very capable Ruby on Rails blogging engine we also recommend). Prior posts have been transferred here.

In the procurement software industry, just like any other, there are truths that go unsaid.

Forrester just exposed a huge one – that most packaged e-Procurement systems purchased by major corporations are “gathering dust” on the shelf instead of being used by their employees.

We’ve been talking about the importance of user adoption in e-Procurement for a long time now. When users revolt your procurement program just can’t succeed.

In category after category of enterprise software, complexity is being rejected in favor of simple, quick solutions that solve a singular problem. Purchasing is no different.

Small and mid-sized organizations simply dismiss over-engineered bloatware of high-end solutions out-of-hand. But what’s surprising from the Forrester report, is how even the world’s largest organizations, while choosing to buy the most complex and complicated packages available on the market, just can’t make them work for their organizations, despite their deep pockets.

-d