>>From London, England. It's the cube covering Coupa. Inspire 19 AMIA brought to you by Cooper. >>Hi. Welcome to the cube Lisa Martin on the ground in London a Coupa inspire 19 please to walk to the cube for the first time. Mads think Jensen partner advisory firm. KPMG. NADHs welcome to the cube. >>Thank you Liza. It's a pleasure to be here. >>Great to have you. So we have all this excitement around us. Lots of folks here in London for Coupa inspire. Talk to me about the state of procurement. Guba talks about P IPE procurement, invoicing, payments, expenses. The procurement has been changing a lot recently. You have a lot of experience in procurement. Talk to me about what the state of procurement is like today. What some of those waves of disruption are. >>Yeah, so you could say traditionally procurement has been very much about, you know, making agreements with suppliers. Uh, the business has have had an, uh, a need and asked or requested procurement to fulfill that need. Typically, it has taken a lot of time and a lot of effort from the procurement departments, uh, in many cases delaying projects. And, and things like that. Businesses are much more agile now. They expect, you know, from different back office functions including procurement, they expect a much more agile approach to delivering services. So if you are running a project, uh, in the business and you go to procurement asking for a specific surface service or product and procurement says, ah, this will take, you know, four to six months, that is absolutely not acceptable. So the businesses in general are now you could say transforming the way that they are requesting procurement services, which means procurement are now being disrupted quite a lot. >>Eh, they have to think very differently. They have to be more proactive instead of being a reactive business partner, you could say. So being proactive in the sense that they embrace the business and actually deliver the needs before they are asked by the business. So that's a way where procurement organizations, they need to be much more predictive and understand what's going on both in the business but also in the market. And then you could say on the other hand, procurement, traditionally they do a contract and then they finalize the contract. And then they kind of keep the hands off. Yeah. So the future is that procurement, they do a contract, of course that's a a key part of being a procurement department, but they also need to operate, operationalize the contracts. So in terms of making sure that the users in in the business that they can actually use the contract and buy onto that specific contract. So a lot of things are changing in procurement and which also means that you will see now different operating models. You will see different interactions with businesses and will see quite a lot of different expectations coming from the business to the procurement departments. >>I can imagine that will be, those are challenges for say an incumbent, a chief procurement officer or financial decision maker who's used to certain processes with certain boundaries. How in your advisory role do you work with clients to help them even just embrace the cultural change that's required of this function to be much more strategic and much more impactful to a business? >>Absolutely. I mean, you know, we use Kupa as a platform to, to help clients transforming the way that they are doing procurement. Eh, and, and actually we don't see a copayment implementation as an it implementation project. We see it as a business transformation project. And the thing is that one thing is that you start changing the way that you're doing things, but it's also a mindset change. And the challenge here for, for CPO so far, procurement officers is actually to make sure that the procurement organization have the necessary challenges to make that transformation. And you know, a lot of the stuff that we are doing when we are implementing solutions like Cooper is of course taking away all the transactional work that's automated. And we are also providing insight. So insight into spin, into to a transaction, to transaction processes, to turnaround times, to delivery, to, you know, all these kinds of things. And the, and the challenge for the CPO is to make sure that the part of the organization that are currently doing very transactional processes, how can they transform to becoming more strategic thinking and proactive people? >>And tell me how from KPMGs perspective, how is Kupa helping to drive that transformation for its customers? >>Yeah, it's a good question actually, because I mean Kubota's a technology, but it's also much more than a technology because as Cooper also emphasizes, it's also about a community. Yes. So the thing is that with a platform like Uber, you get technology support for your processes, but you also get a lot more insight. So you get a lot of possibilities to act in a very different way. So for instance, you can see eh spin patterns. So in that way you can predict how businesses actually on an annual basis, what their need will be. So in that way you can also prepare for some of the stuff that are happening in the business. And also you could see as a procurement person, as assaulting a manager or category innovators as Cooper's calling it, eh, you now have the insight to act. You think more strategic on your supplier, BS, on the marketing, on the market tendencies. You can see how other companies are procuring stuff. Are they going from one type of windows to another type of vendors and how is that going? So you could see Cuba is a tool not only to structure processes and to transformations, but it's also a platform and a technology that changes the way that you think and you act. >>You mentioned the word predictive, it's not going to go. And one of the things that that will, the P and Kupa stands for prescriptive. Rob talked about, I think the number was over 22,000 prescriptions that were delivered through the community just in the last, I think he said 12 months, very short period of time. A lot of innovation there going helping a business in whatever industry it's in. Go from being reactive to proactive, to predictive. Is that a game changer or is that something that you think every business has to become predictive to be relevant? >>Yeah, so you could say, of course it differs a little bit from industry to industry. There are many different ways of of looking at procurement, but a general thing across industries that, that that doesn't really change whether it's manufacturing or fast moving consumer goods or pharmaceutical or whatever is that that the procurement needs to understand the business that they are serving because uh, you know, traditionally procurement, they are a little bit isolated. Like it was, you know, 10, 15 years ago didn't really understand what's going on in the business. In many cases, in many cases it's not like that, but in many cases it is, you know, they are very transactional, they are establishing contracts and things like that. But the thing is that if you don't understand your business and if you don't understand the way your business operates, you know you can have annual cycles, you can have innovation cycles, you can have different demands in the market depending on the time of year and things like that. >>So in general, procurement organizations really need to change their mindset of getting out there, speaking with the business, understanding the business, understanding the strategies, aligning the procurement strategies into the general business strategy. And then embrace innovation. Because, I mean, even though coop as a platform is at a really, really nice place right now with a lot of transformational possibilities, I mean who knows what comes tomorrow. That will be a number of different things changing over the course of you know, two, six months, a year, two years, things like that. So I think in general, procurement organizations need to think in a much more agile way. Adapting, adapting, sorry. What the, what the company in general is adapting. >>So tell me a little bit, let's dig a little bit deeper into what KPMG and Coupa are doing together to drive the future of procurement. >>Absolutely. So KPMG have developed a framework we call power procurement, which F which is a framework that gives, you could say clients are very, very structured way of doing a transformation. And that framework is actually built on top of the Cooper platform. So we have developed a model, which is you could say technology agnostic, but we have specifically developed a model that a, that is placed on top of the Cooper platform where we utilize as a, you know, the possibilities that platform have. And one core thing is that the mantra of Cooper is is measurable business value and the transformation that we want to do together with our clients is exactly open their eyes in terms of how do you get that measurable business value because how do you measure it? What is it that you want to measure? Is it savings only? Not necessarily. It can be a lot of different things. And the Cooper platform you could say enable that transformation process in a really, really good way because you actually don't really think about technology. You think about business transformation and that's why I think you know, the way that we utilize this group as a platform is quite unique. >>So thinking back to your long history in procurement advisory, your background as a supplier and on the industry side, when you look at that compared to you know your, your day to day life where you're a consumer and you're buying things very easily through Amazon and different marketplaces, how is Coupa helping to bring in some of that consumerization and help meet the demands of people that want things to be? To your point, I don't want to be looking at a UI or a technology. I want this to be simpler like it is when I'm going to buy groceries online. Are they helping to really bridge that gap? >>Yeah, so it's a really good question actually because you could see in reality the value comes from a meaningful experience. And you could say traditionally when you have, you know, I was part of the mask organization, the Danish shipping company and eh, you know, we did a lot of stuff on behalf of the business to make sure that they could, you know, do the, execute the role and get the products and services they needed. It was typically a very cumbersome process where people had to think in very complex processes and you know, how do I actually get this thing I need now? And what's happening now with a platform like Kupa is that you actually adopt the way of thinking coming from your private life as well. So it's kind of merging a little bit the way that you think when you do procurement because it's not a complex process. Of course it takes longer in a business environment you can say because also because you need to do a different sourcing exercises. They are regulations in the public safety and so forth. But in, in, in the way that you are thinking of how you procure and get access to the goods and services that you need for, for, for, you know, executing your role. It's a very different mindset and that's where technologies like Cooper comes in as you could say, straightforward way of getting access to these things. >>So KPMG clearly has choice and who it chooses to partner with. Tell me a little bit more about what Kupa and the partnership means to KPMG and the competitive differentiation it might deliver.. >>Yeah, absolutely. I mean they are a number of different platforms in the market of course. And, and it's actually quite interesting these year because there's a lot of development. I actually started out a new company in 2001 where we developed an e-procurement platform. And uh, I can tell that both the suppliers and the market and the suppliers in general have changed quite a lot since then. And a lot of more actors are coming into the market. And the interesting thing is that you know, the, the traditional actors, they have quite some difficulty in following up with, with a company like Cooper. And you could see Cooper as a platform is really interesting because it, first of all, it adopts the cloud technology, which means that eh, companies doesn't have to think about, you know, maintenance operations, you know, all these things that typically come with on premise solutions. >>And, and it has this ability to create this community because the technology platform is developed and designed and architected in the way it is, which means you have a suite of components that all feeds into a common community. Yes. Which create, you could see a much, much better platform to innovate than what we see in the competitive compete competing landscape. So in H in essence, when Rob today talked about the community, that's where we see a huge differentiator, the way that Cooper works with the community and takes intelligence from the community. And based on that can actually come up with really, really impressive, innovative ideas. >>Last question for you. The Mads, the category of business spend management that Coupa is working hard to define. What does that mean from Cape KPMGs perspective? >>Yeah, so so you could see for me it's actually quite eh relieving that eh, that those an actor in the market that that starts to talk about business spend management. It's a, it's a new term that the Cooper have introduced. I mean there have been variations on the, on the, on that subject, but it's the first time that you have a very clear pronunciation of what this all, what this is all about. Because business spend management is much more, more than just the, you could say the narrow procurement bit. Procurement is a course as a huge part of it, but I mean they are expense management as an example. You have all the procurement staff, you have spinned in a lot of different areas, like a salary that's not kind of the part part of the platform yet, but which would make a lot of sense. >>You could say. So this is the first time where you actually have a suite that in all the different components and areas embrace business, spend management, and in in essence, you could see, I think Rob also mentioned it in a very good way. This is actually, it's the procurement department that managers, you know, a huge part of the value of the, in terms of managing the spend. So it's an extremely important task the procurement, uh, organizations have. And the good thing is that we see increasingly see that procurement gets closer and closer to the strategic area of businesses. >>Well, Matt, thank you so much for joining me on the cube and describing the procurement history that you have, what KPMG a Kupa are doing together. We appreciate your time. Thank you, Lisa. It was a pleasure to be here. Likewise for a Mads. I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching the cube from Kupa inspire London 19. Thanks for watching.