Coupa Inspire Kicks Off: R20 and Beyond  

As we dial up our coverage of Inspire 2018, it’s worth stepping back for a moment and doing a level set on what Coupa has unveiled this year already. Coupa R20 was a critical release for the provider, one which we described previously as “revolution through evolution.” As we noted in our previous coverage, some of R20’s main improvements were focused on services procurement and community-based intelligence, which “allows users to extract insights from the B2B data generated within the Coupa buyer and supplier base.”

Services Maestro was a big step for R20. New to the release, it “served up integrated functionality for managing fixed-price deliverables and rate-based services that tie back to Coupa POs set up to manage SOWs, including contractor self-service entry of hours worked,” as we noted previously.

But R20 also introduced quite a bit more, including the following:

• Added capability that extended Coupa’s guided buying approach to steer users in new ways
• Additional Amazon Business integration and workflow enhancements
• Making it easier to find supplier rate cards and create service request forms
• New types of insights for spot buying (showing users whether a supplier is already approved in the supplier master, whether there a leveraged contract / pre-negotiated pricing via Coupa for the supplier, etc.)
• Added approaches for handling supplier certifications
• Additional global tax and compliance support
• Early steps that incorporate some early payment discounting capability
• New capabilities centered on supplier risk monitoring
• Some point improvements that support building out contract lifecycle management (e.g., Word upload and download)

For the full run down on all of these enhancements – and our analysis of them – read Spend Matters research brief on the release.

Like many at Inspire, I’m fascinated to see where Coupa adds on to some of its new building blocks from R20. In the more innovative areas of the release, it seemingly teased with vision more than anything else – providing an early taste of what we will hope will be much more to come in an expeditious manner. Regardless, whatever capabilities Coupa serves in R21 – which we hope it previews live at Inspire – will be fascinating to watch.

Stay tuned!

Up next: reporting on Coupa’s company announcements live from the main stage today.