How Ping Identity Scales Procurement With Coupa

Hello, everyone. We're back at Coupa Inspire. I'm Colleen Coll with Texteron TV.

Our next guest is Matthew Rowe. He's a senior director of business services at Ping Identity, and this is where it gets really good because this is one of Coupa's real customers, so we have a lot to talk about. So Matt, thank you for coming.

Excellent. Good to be here. Oh, great.

How's it been so far? This is- Awesome ... day one at Coupa.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Excellent event. Well, what's the most excellent that you've seen? It's great.

Some of the insights have been absolutely awesome. You just can't get that level of insight without actually being here, speaking to all of the kind of leaders, the appropriate areas, and to the keynote, et cetera, was absolutely outstanding. Oh.

What did you like most about the keynote? AI, definitely. Okay.

Are we going to take a deep dive into AI? Yeah, I don't think it's possible not to. That's right.

So tell me more about Ping Identity and your role. Sure, yeah. So Ping Identity is an identity and access management provider, a global leader in those solutions.

We provide those solutions to customers for both their end customers who are logging into their platforms, et cetera, and for their workforce. Mm-hmm. Again, back to the AI point, identity for AI is absolutely huge.

It's the most critical area for us. We've launched products in that area to really help customers- Mm-hmm ... secure identity for their AI globally.

And that's one of the biggest areas that's going to be a massive constraint to the adoption of AI, is ensuring you've got the appropriate security posture and identity posture- That much ... to enable the scalability- Yeah ... of AI.

Now. Yeah, and in terms of my role, so senior director of business services. So business services is quite a general term, so that covers everything from sourcing to procurement to accounts payable, travel expenses, and insurance.

Yeah. And one of the things that we want to talk about is the workforce transformation. We're talking about the workforce empowerment through Coupa, and connect the dots for me if you want for it.

Sure. Yeah, so in terms of when we implemented Coupa, it really was absolutely huge to empowering and enabling the workforce. So we went from a point where we had a very, very patchwork quilt of manual processes, different technologies, and we worked very closely with business when I first took the role.

Oh, nice. And there was a kind of 30-point improvement plan plus 40 in some- 30 points. for each of the areas.

Yeah. And real frustration across the business at how it wasn't working. Okay.

So in terms of turning that around, the implementation of Coupa's addressed every one of those pain points. Ooh. So in terms of the empowerment and enabling the workforce, it's been absolutely huge to alleviate an absolute ton of the pain and constraints across the business.

Do you find that getting employees to actually use the tools, is it difficult? Or is there something special that you have to do? If it is, why is it still hard?

What can you do to- Yeah ... yeah. So this is one of those areas where I absolutely get it, right?

Mm-hmm. I hear those stats of kind of like 60% spend under management, et cetera, and I get it. There's global companies with hundreds of entities and huge disparity.

We're very fortunate. We've got 100% of spend under management. Now, that's through design.

Yeah, we've got an absolutely superb CFO who absolutely backs us and mandates that Coupa is the platform for all spend. We've then got a team who do an amazing job of supporting the business to enable that to happen as well, so that the business don't feel pain in engaging with Coupa. Mm-hmm.

So all of those combined mean that we have 100% of spend under management. So you're not a Coupa executive, of course. You're a real customer.

What would you tell somebody skeptical about whether this stuff works, especially who actually works outside the demo environment and who might be a potential Coupa customer? Yeah, sure. There's so many different angles to why you would select Coupa, right?

In terms of your pain points, where you're coming from, where you are on the journey, your size of company, et cetera. But what I would say is our learnings from implementing Coupa, there's probably three big ones for us. Number one is as we looked at the market, Coupa was the only provider who could actually create a business case for us.

Yeah. As opposed to it being a spend on new technology. Mm.

So the community, all of the insights, all of the AI that's being deployed, all of the spend intelligence, it meant that we could build a business case where we get a return on that investment, and a material return. So we were able to create a business case in investing in the Coupa platform. Number two is scalability.

Yeah. So we really struggled. We're a company that's growing massively.

We can't keep hiring people within our teams just to support that growth. We have to be smart about the technology, how we implement it, how we automate. Coupa's enabled us to be scalable, and that is absolutely huge to us.

And through the supplier portal, through all of the automation, through the embedded AI, it's been absolutely huge in helping us drive the automation. So the scalability's been absolutely huge for us. And then the third one is the breadth of platform.

So as we were looking at the market, we wanted true end-to-end solution because the data is going to be the fabric of AI, and we need the data to be consistent across the end-to-end process. We couldn't find any other vendor in the market that would cover source to pay, plus expenses, plus a number of the other areas as well. So I think it was those three things for us of a business case-Truly scalable platform and the technology that enables us to have a scalable AI solution in time.

Have you had any, during day one and your getting together with other real customers here, have you had any conversations with other customers that you found insightful, who maybe experience the same that you have with Coupa? Absolutely. Yeah, so it's really fascinating how different customers have different challenges- Yeah ...

different size of business, et cetera. And you can just learn so much from their own challenges and how they've solved it in a different way to how you're even thinking about it. Yeah.

So that's been the massive value for us. And some of the announcements today, like I was discussing with a customer yesterday, Rossum. Mm-hmm.

And then today it's announced there's an acquisition, right? So there's that angle to it as well of different customers, and not just Coupa, but the Coupa community and the breadth of technology, even that supports Coupa through their partners, actually can help solve problems in different ways. So I found that hugely insightful.

Now, what is the most tangible outcome, your team, now that you've adopted Coupa? What's one of the most tangible outcomes you've seen that you can point to? And how-- Has anything changed?

Yeah, so it's the output for us. So my point on the scalability and the business case, all of it is driven by the output that we can achieve from the platform. Mm-hmm.

And we've set ourselves the objective through AI, through the AI embedded in Coupa, to automate 80% of our processes, which will enable us to support the scalability of the business and drive further value. And that's where we're a long way along that journey already. But day one, we immediately saw a huge increase in output from, in terms of invoice processing, POs processed, et cetera.

So that was absolutely huge for us. But for us, it's more about that 80% goal, and we're already north of 55%, so we're doing an excellent job already at getting ourselves there. That's wonderful.

And last question. Have you seen any other insights from your day here that you would take back to your employees? I'm sorry, your team.

And is this your first Coupa? It is, yeah. Oh, wonderful.

Yeah. That's awesome. But anything that you want to take back to your team as something insights?

Yeah. I was literally messaging my team as I was in the keynote, right? So yes.

I don't know where to start, but the Navi stuff that's coming is where we want it to be. And that's exactly where we want to be. Oh, yeah.

So that keynote is exactly what I'm taking back. A good discussion with Rossum on how they can help us automate invoicing, help us improve our supplier onboarding process. So those are probably the two massive things that I'll be taking back to the team.

But there's a long list, but those are the two right now that are absolutely huge in helping us progress. No, that's wonderful. Thank you, Matt, for joining us today.

I think it's the afternoon of day one, and this has been great. I've learned so much. And to all of you, stay tuned.

We have more to come at Coupa Inspire.