Overview
To establish more efficient procurement operations and consolidate disparate systems for a utility company, CrossCountry Consulting’s Coupa implementation experts conducted a full-scale assessment and redesign of the company’s Source-to-Pay capabilities. By simplifying routine requests, enabling automated workflows, and implementing various digital procurement efficiencies, the team stood up a new, flexible S2P model that aligns people, process, and data.
Expertise delivered
- Accounts payable automation
- Executive dashboarding and visualizations
- Harmonized spend cube
- Systems rationalization
- Implementation and recommendation roadmap
- Transformation governance and leadership
Challenge
The Source-to-Pay (S2P) technology and process architecture of a large regional utility company was outdated and fragmented, leading to significant operational inefficiencies and suboptimal user experience.
The distributed company was using more than 10 systems to execute a standard S2P process. It also lacked a holistic way to transform its procurement function and rationalize technology for tangible time and dollar savings.
A single cloud-based S2P solution was needed.
How We Helped
The Coupa implementation and Procurement Transformation experts at CrossCountry Consulting recommended Coupa as the system of choice. This would help consolidate and replace all existing systems into one comprehensive platform. As a Coupa leader since 2014 and with more than 650 deployments completed, the team had extensive experience deploying Coupa on-time and on-budget.
The work didn’t stop there, however.
The company needed a data-driven procurement governance model that could help visualize procurement ROI and align on people, process, and data moving forward. The team designed and established this model, which included eight executive KPIs across three categories:
| 1. Experience | 2. Efficiency | 3. Effectiveness |
|---|---|---|
| User adoption | Touchless transactions | Spend under management |
| Customer satisfaction | Transaction cycle time | Supplier fragmentation |
| On-time payment | Diversity spend |
With the new S2P framework taking shape, additional digital functionality and analytics were enabled. For instance, the historical multiple points of entry for suppliers and users at the start of the S2P process were streamlined into one intake channel. Within this channel, stakeholders could then be routed to specific actions, like purchase requests, payment requests, or report requests.
This capability allowed procurement leaders and executives to fully grasp the flow of requests and their estimated impact on capacity, resources, spend, and labor hours. These dimensions, among many others, fed into a company-wide analysis of over $3 billion in spend, which allowed the team to create a harmonized spend cube of all stock and non-stock spend.
Results
Numerous S2P enhancements delivered key benefits as soon as they came online:
Sourcing module launched in 6 weeks, yielding:
- 19% average savings on sourcing events.
- 150+ sourcing events completed in 3 months.
Contract Lifecycle Management module launched in 4 months, resulting in:
- 22 contract categories.
- 7 configured templates.
- 700 contracts loaded into the repository.
- 4 new contracts completed within 1 week of go-live.
Procure-to-Pay design efficiencies, leading to:
- 50+ new catalogs.
- 4 purchase order types consolidated into 1.
The company was able to achieve higher-quality requisitions, a rationalized set of system-driven approvals, greater supplier collaboration, and faster e-invoicing.
CrossCountry’s integrated transformation experts enabled the company to tap into substantial procurement savings and right-size its operating model for the future. New, streamlined workflows should continue to generate process and labor efficiencies as the company’s Coupa environment remains flexible to evolving business demands.