Coupa power users and admins continue to identify innovative ways to optimize procurement processes, improve user experience, and achieve significant cost savings within their organizations. In fact, a recent study found that organizations generated 276% ROI within three years of implementation.
Additional functionality and AI-assisted guidance with each release have empowered teams to make decisions more quickly and leverage Coupa in an expanded capacity beyond spend management, including ESG, compliance, and Plan-to-Pay.
These catalysts are shaping the future of the Coupa ecosystem and the transformative value it brings. In looking ahead to 2025, here are some of the key use cases and focus areas for procurement and finance teams:
What’s Top of Mind in Coupa?
- Focusing on benchmarks and metrics: Understanding Coupa’s benchmarks allows users to identify areas for improvement, such as structured spend, pre-approved spend, on-contract spend, and e-invoicing adoption. These metrics can be easily tracked within Coupa’s reporting module and provide an important point of reference for Coupa users interested in knowing where they can stretch or change their processes within the system.
- Reducing technical debt: Consolidating point solutions into Coupa’s platform can simplify processes, reduce maintenance costs, and improve data visibility. Technical debt can account for 40% of IT balance sheets, which can tie down 50% of engineers’ time. Comprehensive enterprise platforms like Coupa help pay down technical debt and prevent additional IT bloat in the future.
- Improving user-friendliness: Features like guided buying, linked forms, and user interface enhancements simplify navigation and task completion for all users, especially infrequent users. Promoting a better experience improves uptime and day-to-day efficiencies with less clicking, scrolling, and troubleshooting. This includes centralizing fragmented and disparate financial processes into a standardized application: Central reporting is at the corporate HQ level without disrupting the day-to-day of individual functions or office locations.
- Leveraging AI with Navi: Coupa’s AI assistant, Navi, helps users find information, automate tasks like invoice approvals, and create reports through natural language interactions. Navi helps move users through the platform and simplifies common actions in key procurement workflows, like fielding intake and purchase requests and creating dashboards.
- Automating invoice processing: Utilizing Coupa’s native invoice automation tools or marketplace options can significantly reduce manual work and improve efficiency. It’s estimated that 84% of companies that automate their accounts payables (AP) generate more cash flow and save up to $70,000 a year.
- Embracing emerging technologies: Features like virtual cards for secure payments and risk management add-ons enhance Coupa’s capabilities and address evolving procurement and expense needs. The use of AI and automation will continue to drive process enhancements, and procurement leaders will be looking for their technology investments to reach the bottom line and drive revenue as a percentage of rebates.
- Empowering the organizational mission: By centralizing an expanding list of core corporate functions in one platform, leaders can spend more time focusing on the reasons they built their businesses. This is especially powerful in non-profit, education, healthcare, and other essential sectors that often deal with legacy software and manual processes that drain technical, financial, and operational resources. Coupa enables businesses to focus resources and capital on achieving their mission while worrying less about back-office operations.
Maximizing Coupa Value
While the Coupa platform is foundational to procurement transformation, its value can be extended and accelerated further with additional inputs. For example, Coupa’s extensive training resources for end users provide a base knowledge to accomplish many business spend management tasks, but more comprehensive bespoke training from an implementation partner is another value-add.
CrossCountry Consulting’s Coupa team hosts live virtual and in-person training sessions, produces recurring release guides, and conducts hands-on advisory and admin for Coupa users looking to take the next step in their Coupa journey.
There’s also a host of ERP integrations and third-party applications that support further functionality, allowing users to migrate even more of their back-office activities into Coupa, including contract management, e-signatures, and tax compliance, among others.
To capitalize on Coupa in 2025, contact CrossCountry Consulting.