PayStream Advisors continues our attendance today at the two-day conference hosted by Coupa, a leading provider of cloud-based financial applications, in San Francisco, CA. Raja Hammoud, Coupa’s VP of Product Management, led this morning’s keynote session. She spoke of Coupa’s successes and added functionalities over the past year as well as what’s in store in the coming months. Following Raja’s introductory keynote, Erik Wahl, an author, artist, and entrepreneur gave an incredibly inspiring speech about reawakening your inner creativity and how procurement and finance professionals can use that creativity to break boundaries and revolutionize their industry. 

Raja began her session by telling a story of how one of Coupa’s customers, the Columbian Government, heard of a small village of less than 10,000 people using Coupa’s procurement function to source insurance for their village. They accomplished their goal without any training from Coupa or their government. This stands as a testament of how truly innovative and easy to use Coupa really is. Raja attributed this success to how Coupa’s product strategy rests on three principles: holistic spend capture, delivering user-friendly experiences, and offering comprehensive and organic solutions.

Holistic spend capture is a foundation because you can’t manage what you can’t capture. Delivering user-friendly experiences is how Coupa drives adoption within organizations. By offering consumer-like dashboards and recognizable paradigms within their platform, employees are more likely to use Coupa. Raja said that the moment a software becomes more frustrating or confusing than a traditional paper-based method, that’s the moment adoption ceases. Coupa’s third principle of delivering a comprehensive organic suite is simple. They sought to build a solution from the ground up, not putting together pieces of other applications and rebranding. In doing so, they created an end-to-end solution for the entire spend process covering procurement, expenses, and invoices.

Over the past year Coupa has flushed out their newest functionality, Coupa Procurement. Administrators are able to tag items they want to go to the top of search results when users are sourcing. In this manner, they may suggest items that they’ve found are particularly valuable or cost-effective while still offering choices to the end-user. What’s more, the end-users are able to compare preferred items with others to see if they are satisfactory for their needs. Another feature new to the procurement platform is improved approval workflow by skipping unnecessary approvers when designated by administrators. This was obviously something that Coupa user’s had been asking for—at its announcement, the audience went into a raucous applause.

Raja also announced several product features that are new to Coupa and will be arriving within the next few months. Search optimization dashboards will soon arrive that allow administrators to view search information within their own organization in real time. The benefits to this are plentiful. Increased insight into what top items are being sought after, what items users were unable to find, as well as what searches lead to preferred purchases are just a few.

Another groundbreaking enhancement comes to the Coupa invoicing platform. Coupa found that AP departments often struggle with invoices that do not have a matching contract or PO; they are then left wondering who should approve such invoices. Now invoices submitted will have an “invoice requester” field allowing suppliers to route the invoice to the appropriate email address.

Perhaps the most highly anticipated and biggest announcement this morning was Coupa’s newest product, Coupa Inventory. Raja explained that through focus groups and customer interaction, her team was finding that it is often critical for organizations that have a large inventory to be able to better manage that inventory and have visibility when purchasing. They found that, particularly in the healthcare and food and beverage industries, organizations were often buying items they already had. Therefore, they sought to create a solution that would eliminate redundant spend. Coupa Inventory also invites an enriched shopping experience by allowing users to see what items are on hand and what items are running low. By carefully monitoring overstocked, understocked, or regularly ordered products, organizations can improve spend optimization and increase revenues. Raja said to expect the rollout of Coupa Inventory in late Q2 2014.

Following Raja’s keynote was a powerful and motivating presentation by artist and author, ErikWahl. He told a story of failure and success and of his personal journey in reawakening his inner creativity. Erik polled the audience “Who here can draw?” As you might expect, no one raised their hand. He said that when asking the same question to a group of teenagers, 8-10 percent of the audience would raise their hand. He went on to say that when asking early grade school children, nearly every child raises their hand. Like most, as a child, Erik was taught that being an artist, being creative, or being innovative is something we cannot or should not do. Throughout his adulthood, Erik said that he went from being successful in business to having everything taken away from him in the blink of an eye. It was at that time that Erik began to paint and took the risk of investing everything he had left in himself as a painter. He is now a highly successful artist, author, and motivational speaker because of that risk. See a sample of his paintings below.

Erik reminded us that to be truly innovative involves ignoring the fear to take risks. He saidthat fear is an acronym meaning False Evidence Appearing Real; that too often we let society tell us that we should follow the status quo and not upset the herd. He likened this mantra to the late Steve Jobs (as well as painted him in less than three minutes, see above). Jobs was repeatedly told that his method of thinking and innovation would never work. I think we all know where those naysayers are today. Like Apple, Coupa continues to reinvent spend optimization with creativity and innovation. To say the least, Erik’s presentation was truly inspiring…wink wink. #coupainspire