Update increases business intelligence and adds new capabilities across platform 

Coupa Software (NASDAQ:COUP), a leader in cloud-based spend management, today announced Coupa Release 17 (R17), its first major cloud platform update of the year. R17 gives customers comprehensive data-driven insights to help them accelerate decision-making and improve business results. The insights leverage the data network effects of the Coupa platform’s B2B spend under management to help customers gain more value and spend smarter.

“Customers seek big data solutions that deliver B2B insights and benchmarks to drive business decisions,” said R “Ray” Wang, principal analyst, founder and chairman of Constellation Research, Inc. “Only forward thinking providers with clear data acquisition strategies and large data warehouses are able to deliver these types of powerful data network effects. Cloud providers have an advantage over on-premises solutions in innovation and flexibility.”

The release also expands global regulatory compliance, enhances supplier collaboration and adds new capabilities across the entire Coupa platform from travel and expense management to sourcing, e-invoicing, inventory and more.

“We value Coupa’s focus on continued rapid innovation. This in turn enables us to affect ongoing improvements in our procure-to-pay and spend management processes,” said James Bargerbos, Coupa Administrator at Ausdrill Limited. “We have been involved in the Coupa Community and advisory boards and we are pleased to see our feedback incorporated in Release 17.”

As with every Coupa platform update, R17 was designed with a collaborative and innovative approach that involved customer ideas and feedback through the active Coupa Community and Coupa Advisory Boards. The R17 platform update became available just four months after Coupa’s R16 release in September 2016.

Release 17 includes:

Perfect Fit Insights (Early Access Program Only) – A new unified application in the Coupa cloud platform for business spend. This market-differentiated solution delivers cross-customer savings, efficiency and adoption metrics to help organisations track and measure key performance metrics inclusive of customer specific goals, trends and category leader indexes. The application provides actionable recommendations for making specific business improvements. Perfect Fit Insights is currently being made available to select customers in an Early Access Program.

Expanded Regulatory Compliance– As government regulations change, the Coupa platform changes with them. This release adds country-specific invoicing templates for Australia, Belgium, Czech Republic, Singapore, Slovakia, Spain and Poland.

Enhanced Supplier Collaboration– Connecting businesses is an important aspect of the Coupa Open Business Network^TM which includes more than two million connected suppliers globally. Release 17 makes it easier than ever for organisations to collaborate by:

• extending the window for sharing information with bidders and answering supplier questions following the end of sourcing events.
• adding SMS text message alerts so suppliers can get immediate updates for cross platform capabilities such as purchase orders, invoice payments, catalog updates and supplier information management updates. These SMS text message alerts continue to redefine B2B supplier networks by proactively delivering real-time updates to suppliers of all sizes instead of requiring a network log in to check status. This new SMS capability adds to existing supplier alerts via email.