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Ebook
It Isn’t Magic.
It’s Modernization.
Three Experts Offer an Inside Look Into Their Business Spend Management Transformations.
Unlock the true potential of procurement — all with this secret ingredient.
2020 turned the business world upside down. Leaders began reexamining their internal processes, especially when it came to Business Spend Management (BSM). Between the sudden squeeze on working capital and adjusting to a remote work environment, businesses felt intense pressure to be agile and scale. However, many of their existing solutions were stretched to the limits.
During a time of great turmoil and uncertainty, three experts faced the challenge of modernizing their business processes head-on.
Industry leaders Dent Wizard, Sun River Healthcare, and EyeCare Partners understood that as their companies scaled up their business spend, procurement and compliance processes would have to change, too. As they adjusted to the new normal, they all came to a similar conclusion: digital transformations can take painful and arduous processes and make them stress-free and efficient.
Find Your Secret Ingredient: The Perfect Business Spend Management Solution
Transformation doesn’t happen without a catalyst — a combination of the right moment, the right means, and the right application to take you from raw material to something totally new. A comprehensive Business Spend Management solution brings all procurement processes together in one platform. With the help of a well-versed partner to help you transition into the new system, you may just experience the magic of transformation for yourself.
Coupa and Acquis Consulting Group make the right Business Spend Management partners: Coupa brings the innovation for Business Spend Management solutions that can take some of the most challenging procurement processes and smooth out the wrinkles. Acquis brings expertise in spend management advisory, implementation and change management.
When businesses tap this powerhouse duo to integrate the Coupa Business Spend Management platform into their procurement process, modernization happens.
Start With What You Know (and What You Don’t)
Issues with AP, for example, or invoicing — are merely pain points felt downstream. The real change has to come from the very top: the system itself.
Tyson Moore, SVP at Acquis, put it this way: “I tell my customers, ‘You can call me Coupa, you can call my Coupa associates Acquis, it shouldn’t really matter. There should be no differentiation between our two companies because we are both aligned for the customer’s success and their ongoing transformation, and we’re here to dig in and really become a strategic partner with an organization.’”
Establishing a Strong Connection
Like any good SaaS partner, Coupa and Acquis work together to build a foundation of trust with their customers. Richard Slipec, SVP of Global Mid-Market Sales at Coupa, notes that the hesitancy some customers feel quickly vanishes once the Acquis team begins their assessment, and the Acquis team often establishes a deep rapport with the client right from the start. Tyson agrees. “We get into some really intimate conversations with the customers.”
Richard explains that he gets excited when customers express weariness about working with a third-party implementation partner. “Then I talk about the hundreds of successful implementations that Acquis has done for us.”
A Little Goes a Long Way
Once customers discover a new, more potent solution, it’s hard to go back to the old way.
For Coupa and Acquis, success goes beyond one customer at one company. A true mark of success for them is what they call “second-gens” or “third- gens”: customers who have worked with Coupa and Acquis on implementation before, and wish to carry that success and that comprehensive solution into the next opportunity that comes the customer’s way.
These repeat customers have seen the impact of a comprehensive Business Spend Management platform like Coupa, and can’t wait to continue to optimize their business spend management processes.
Alchemizing Legacy Systems for the New Normal
Embracing change at the right time can mean the difference between thriving and struggling. And that can mean transforming systems that haven’t been touched in a very, very long time. Whether it’s too many processes or too few (or worse, no process at all), setting clear expectations and steps for your procurement process can actually make things easier in the long term.
Becoming a Single Platform
Dent Wizard, a national automotive reconditioning company, was in a predicament: They had never used a purchasing system, and they were incredibly decentralized. Techs in the field made up their own purchasing preferences and bought their own products ad hoc.
When Steve Lewis, former Director of Strategic Sourcing at Dent Wizard, arrived on the scene and started working with Coupa and Acquis to lay some groundwork, one of his first big moves was to redefine the customer/vendor relationship through RFPs.
With help from Acquis, Steve and his purchasing partner could also start solving the decentralization problem by giving individual buyers the freedom to purchase from an approved list of items, all in the same system, without straining their resources.
Transforming Manual Struggle with Digital Support
For many companies, labor-intensive back-end processes like procurement and compliance involve long email chains, constant phone calls, and managing bundles of actual paper receipts. All these things are stressful for staff and draw focus from where it should be located: on the health and safety of patients.
Coupa improves these scattered processes through a single, streamlined system which takes tedious manual work and efficiently transforms it digitally. Coupa is one of the first toolsets a new acquisition leverages when joining EyeCare Partners. Ease of adoption allows business to get up and a running quicker, be more strategic in operations, and simplify their overall business.
A Concoction to Withstand the Tests of Time
For many companies, transformation is most necessary when business is booming and working capital is on the rise. Growth can shine a light on old processes that no longer serve a business’s future goals, and in fact, may cause roadblocks when aligning new acquisitions.
Sun River Healthcare, a federally qualified health center, acquired another company that was already using Coupa. Neil Latman, VP of Financial Reporting, felt that this was the perfect opportunity to push
the parent company towards a new, streamlined approach to managing and approving orders.
Coupa + Acquis Alchemy
When these three experts dug into their current procurement process, they found that it was holding their business back, rather than powering their business forward. With the right solution (and the right partner to support implementation), transforming the procurement process became a force multiplier, boosting profitability, freeing up resources to pursue other company initiatives, and allowing for scalability and flexibility where there was once only stasis and status quo.
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