INTAKE & ORCHESTRATION
Chris Courtemanche, Global Coupa Process Owner, Glencore
Can you walk us through that shift from the fragmented processes and low visibility, to having centralised control of spend and approvals? Glencore is a very diversified natural resources company, but with that comes some challenges, because each of the commodities tends to have its own ERP system. We had a scenario where we had a very big regionalised spend spread across a number of different ERP systems – and we weren’ t in a place to do a single ERP rollout. We had to find a solution, so we looked at the market and did a comparison of some of the key market leaders, and that landed on Coupa. It was really about bringing all of those different ERP systems and all of those different spends and different processes into one single space. We had scenarios where we negotiated great contracts, but the same item that had a contract price was bought at different prices across all those business units. So, we really had a contract leakage issue, and that was the core of our business case around Coupa.
How does the Coupa platform lend itself to centralisation? What value have you already seen? It really brought us to the next level of maturity. We now have regional sourcing teams in place – strategic teams that look at spend trends across the market and negotiate these great multi-year contracts. We have high contract compliance and very low leakage across those agreements, because we manage the data and the spend in a central place rather than depending on different ERP teams to upload and manage that data. It hasn’ t done the work for us, but it’ s been a great enabler to that maturity that we’ ve been looking for.
I’ d love to hear a specific example of when having Coupa added more value to the business. There are a lot of examples. Before Coupa we were pretty paperbased. The pandemic came along and of course we had to push people out of the office. Luckily we had Coupa at the time, which enabled us to weather that storm. People worked remotely and we didn’ t have any issues with suppliers engaging us,
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