Name: Coupa X Optis Webinar V3 V2 (1080p)
Uploaded: 2026-01-07T03:02:54.067Z
Duration: 50 min 25 s
Description: Coupa X Optis Webinar V3 V2 (1080p)

Transcript for "Coupa X Optis Webinar V3 V2 (1080p)": Hello, everyone, and welcome. Thank you for joining us today for today's webinar. Managing Direct Spend in Global Manufacturing. The reality is that 2025 has been defined by unprecedented complexity. We are facing persistent pressure from global shipping bottlenecks, commodity scarcity, trade wars and evolving tariffs. Supply chains are now fundamentally reinventing themselves to balance resilience with efficiency. The future of business trade has arrived And in the face of these unparalleled disruptions, businesses must find a way to do it all. I'm Ella Wilkinson, broadcast editor for Procurement Magazine. And to help us navigate this transformation, we are joined by two leaders in the field. Mark Schenecker, VP of Direct Materials at Cooper and Raphael Zviuble, Partner at Optus Consulting. They will walk us through how to effectively manage these changes, balance future investment decisions and find those hidden opportunities for growth. So we have a packed agenda. So let's just jump straight in. Over to you, Mark. Good morning, Ella. So here's our agenda today. Just a quick introduction and welcome. We're going to talk about the trends that we see emerging in 2026, specifically for direct spend in manufacturing, how that's being transformed. Then we're gonna take a look at how to actually get that into effect. So it's enabling the global teams to actually get solutions implemented, a few real world insights and some questions, and then we'll wrap it up. So if we go to the next, let's go ahead and just jump right into it. My name is Mark Schoeniker. I head up the direct materials practice at Coupa. My background is in supply chain management. And I'm Rafael Zweibiu, partner at Optus Consulting. I've been working in source to pay implementations with Coupa for the past fourteen years, working a lot with manufacturers of all kinds of sizes all around the globe. I want to start, let's jump right into the trends that we're seeing in emerging in 2026. And of course, this is based largely on what we've seen in the past and what's continuing, right? There's four that we wanna outline today. Four that I think make it really hard to manage a supply chain. And the first one is volatility. So the one thing we used to think volatility was just, I mean, it would occur now and then we'll figure out how to go after it. But now what we're seeing is that volatility is a constant. It just happens all the time. And we saw persistent pressure on the supply chains in 2025. We had shipping bottlenecks and conflicts and wars and mineral scarcity and political maneuvering around mineral scarcity. And oh, by the way, higher freight costs. And Boston Consulting Group says that the supply chain leaders can easily identify volatility is costing them over a million dollars, right? Now this may not mean a lot, but whenever you have more volatility, more events, it starts to really affect the productivity of the supply chain. Now, one of the most persistent measures of volatility were tariffs. Tariffs are not something that I think were well planned for, there's something that tended to be more constant. And if we just said, yeah, the tariffs are around 10%. Now trade policy is a weapon, or a tactic, used freely and frequently by the governments around the world. So that became the defining challenge in 2025. We don't see that changing in 2026. And it's a huge impact to the landed costs. So I need to track the cost of buying material, the cost of my tariffs, the cost of other taxes or freight, and then say, that's my total cost for buying that material or buying those parts. So an example, you only saw a 50% increase in the tariffs in steel and aluminum. And guess what? That goes to the CEO. So it's not the kind of visibility you want for your supply chain, but it's what we got. And it's going to be front and center for the C suite, the supply chain like never before is being transformed because of this volatility and because of tariffs. And what we want is something that basically is saying, these trends are not changing, so we have to adapt and change. And that leads to the third trend, the supply chain unchanged. And that's really the transformation of how we look at a supply chain. So we've always had one goal and that is cost containment. How do get the cost of materials, the cost of production, the cost of freight? Every single part of our cost structure is aligned to lowering the costs. It's not about creating a more resilient supply chain or creating adaptability. Now, what we're seeing is supply chain saying, okay, we have to be a lot more resilient. If this country of origin for this part gets slapped with a 50% tariff, we need to shift and we need to find that supply somewhere else. And so what we're doing now is instead of aggregating all of our demand, we're splitting it up and saying, we're gonna buy from different countries, same part, In effect, we're hedging and that hedging is driving resilience. So we're reinventing how we source, how we procure and how we use those materials in manufacturing. And to help us is the thinking factory. There's no question at the beginning of 2025, we all were experimenting with AI. And I have to tell you, we have really crossed during the year from experimentation to making AI an essential part of our infrastructure. We're only limited by our creativity, the tools there. And I think all of us have at least one, if not two or three examples of where it has really worked in our organization. So I think we've made that shift. And I think the trend in 2026 is gonna be that we are really using AI and we're measuring the effectivity and the returns that we get from it in a cohesive and accurate and high quality way. So this isn't just about automation, right? It's about creating intelligence and that intelligence basically is what's driving our ability to create an adaptive supply chain. So these are the trends that we're seeing in 2026. So let's go to the next and let's look at the kind of, this is my perspective of volatility. So I've been practicing the supply chain, both planning and execution, since the turn of the century, it's hard to say that, but what's affected me most in terms of trying to get my parts and materials into factories has really been events, right? Whether it was nineeleven, hurricanes, weather events like tsunamis or hurricanes, I was stuck in Europe, Bob was stuck. Was in Europe when the volcano erupted in Iceland and I got to extend my stay for a couple of weeks. But what we're seeing here is it's not only the volatility of events, right? Whether it's wars or environmental impacts or self imposed like a tariff, but we at the same time have had enormous changes in the technology infrastructure that supports our supply chain practices. Everything from IoT, artificial intelligence, localization, everything is affecting us at the same time that we have these volatility or basically these events. What I've really seen is that in the first twenty years of this century, I've had as many volatile events in the last five years that I have had in the last twenty. So the rate of these volatility, these events is just increasing and we don't see this going down. So what it's really teaching us is that volatility is a constant. That means that we need to design our supply chains to be a lot more resilient, not just cost effective, but also to be something that can sustain and plan for the fact that there's going to be a volatile event. There's going to be a major shift in the way technology is used. So given the change is the only constant here, what is probably the most important first step someone should take to prepare for volatility in their supply chain? So there's multiple steps, Ellis, a great question. So one thing we've done is we said, hey, we're gonna aggregate. We've been told this from day one, we're gonna aggregate all of our spend with as few suppliers as we can. And what that does is it allows us to write a contract that's a much higher volume and a higher volume, higher dollar amount gives me a better discount. To make a supply chain more resilient, it means I need to spread my purchasing across multiple suppliers. And that's completely at odds with everything we've done in terms of cost control. So the very first thing we're gonna do is we're going to revisit all of our sources of supply. We're not gonna aggregate as aggressively as we have done. And we're gonna look at product and say, we care about who creates or crates the materials or the parts, but not only that, but where it's created, because that's basically part of creating resiliency against tariffs or resiliency against even, you know, weather events or wars. I mean, every part of our supply chain it's global. And to address that, we have to think about sourcing and buying and procuring product and materials from different places on the planet. Great. Let's go into the tariffs just a little bit. Let's go to the next slide. So the tariffs have completely transformed the way that I work, right? I mean, and this is really the top new external concern. So normally I look internally, I'm trying to keep my factories running. I'm looking at downtime of equipment. I'm looking at events that are affecting how my supply chain is, how I am making products. So the external part of this really, has emerged as basically a much higher concern than actually keeping equipment running or keeping my logistics flowing. So right now, what are we doing? The one thing we hate doing, we're increasing our inventory levels. And inventory for me has always been the measure of our efficiency. So the less inventory I have, the better job I'm doing. That's a key metric for how I'm performing. So we're not at the same time, we're gonna say, okay, we'll increase inventory and we're gonna try and offset that by automating processes. And we're doing some hedging. Mean, are some of the more advanced techniques of saying, I'll write a longer term contract if I can get the price of that material down. So I'll hedge, especially if I've got anything that's commodity based with metals like steel or aluminum, I'm trying hedge those product price increases. So what I'm really doing at the end is I'm restructuring my entire supply chain to allow for the fact that tariffs are gonna be a key part of the volatility going forward. Should we go to the next and we'll go into basically, I wanna kind of look at the supply chain as we've always looked at it over time. So I'm on the top, I've got my source to pay process, right? I'm trying to find products, I get my items set up, parts and my suppliers, I negotiate contracts, run through procurement, and I'm basically writing usually a schedule agreement or a blanket PO, I'm buying a 100,000 units over the course of the next one hundred and eighty days. And I'm having them shipped at various times. And then, I get invoiced and I remit. And if you look at this, I'm basically sending this message pattern back and forth. And we look at it like, okay, I'm one company that's buying, but I'm also sourcing from two, three, 4,000 different suppliers. They're all writing quote to cash. In reality, I'm managing a quote to cash process for my suppliers with one source to pay. So this is really a bit chaotic. I'm constantly chasing down and looking for messages and my suppliers understanding of what I need is really kind of message by message. It's like, what is the last thing that my supply chain said it, hey, I need this product at this place at this time. So let's go to the next and we'll look at basically the proposal of how we create a more resilient supply chain. And that is creating a common business process to define for both myself and my organization, but more importantly for my suppliers, this is the shared business process. From the point at which we design and source and identify the materials and parts that we need all the way through, into robust, repetitive procurement processes, and then of course settling. And if you have this common process, right? And one that we can both see, this is what we hold accountable. We hold our transactions accountable to a common flow. So we are obviously still moving our messages. We're still sustaining the data requirements for our ERP and our manufacturing execution systems, but we're seeing with our suppliers a common business process. So we both know where we stand in terms of where we are for every part or material in the flow. Let's go to that one more, the next. And I wanna talk a little bit about how a common business process is the heart of basically artificial intelligence, or we call the thinking factory. In this case, we call it intelligent demand sensing, but it's really looking at the performance of a supplier. So in my organization, I'm looking, I'm over in the sourcing side with design, we're brand new parts, right? So here's my new product or my new revision, a new version of a product in 2026. And I'm seeing a material included more and more, right? At the same time, I might see the contract, but really contracts are typically involved in that sourcing process. But when I actually move downstream, this is planning. And in planning, I might see a problem with the suppliers not committing to the volumes I need at the time that I need it. So one of the symptoms of that is I start getting safety stock violations downstream. And then if I'm really, from the planner, I move to the buyer and the buyer is the one managing getting the PO out, getting commits back, the ASN receiving shipments. And what they're seeing is that, hey, seven out of 10 times you're on time, which is a terrible, terrible for keeping my factory running. But on the finance side, that's AP, that's the fourth role. They're seeing that supplier factoring some of their receivables that I owe. So I'm paying the bank, not paying them. I'm also seeing their invoices are maybe not matching what my PO is. It collectively, I've got four different roles working this process. Now the handoff of the common business process, make sure that nothing is dropped. But the truth is when AI looks at it holistically, it sees all the data. It says, okay, it senses, analyzes, and then it's time to act. First thing is we need to recalibrate our lead times. We're gonna have to also figure out how to get another alternative source of supply because this supplier cannot meet our needs. Let's take a look at the second example that we're using. And this is the one that everybody wants. I really want AI to tell me what's gonna happen to the price of my products and my parts and my materials. Hey, we're gonna increase our demand. Well, demand typically means that I'm gonna buy more. Hopefully I can write a better contract, but a resilient supply chain says, don't buy it from one person now spread it out. So I'm increasing it, but I'm not necessarily getting the price negotiation that I can with volumes. So what I do is I look to the network and in Coupa's case, have 10,000,000 members in the network. And I see that there is generically for, let's say the price of cold rolled steel, a 5% increase from the beginning of the year to right now. And what that really means is that across the network, we're seeing this rise, this increase in prices, but we also combine that with external marketplaces. So eWorldTrade, we're really close partners with Amazon business, global sources and different commodity indices that basically say, hey, collectively, here's the red arrow going up. We don't like red arrows. We like green arrows going down. And what this means is it's just gonna cost us more. I mean, this price is gonna go up. Now, I don't know exactly how much, but I can look at these indicators and say, how can I maybe perhaps look at hedging? Hedging really relies statistically on a prediction that if the price is going up, hey, I'll hedge and lock in a lower price for a longer period of time to try and get a better price effectivity. And if I spread it out, more resiliency. So that's kind of the four trends that we see. If we just advance to one more, this kind of the summary of it. We're really advocating for is creating an adaptive supply chain. So volatility is not gonna go away and tariffs are not gonna disappear. The geopolitical risks, labor shortages, it's going to happen. So the way to do that, the way to create resiliency is to create a supply chain that says, hey, we understand that we have to build to adapt, right? Not just build to the lowest cost, the lowest cost labor, lowest cost region, lowest cost part, aggregated spend. Those concepts now are not in the forefront. What is in the forefront is digitally connecting your suppliers, planning for disruption and using AI with this data set that I have to create completely new ideas for how I manage the supply chain. So when we're thinking about these AI agents then, they oversee four people's worth of jobs within a chain, How much oversight does a human have? And is it just one human or is it all four of them again? So in that example, what's really happening is the AI is alerting, right? In this case, the supply chain team, and saying, I see a problem with the supplier. So the supplier moves from being a supplier that is meeting needs, or basically just has some disruption to one that says, I've identified the suppliers being really high risk. It doesn't tell you that you should get an alternative source of supply. What it's really doing is informing you so that the human, the supply chain team can take action. So it does that sensing and that analysis and provides that to the team to evaluate and act. That's still allowing the human to make the decision, but it's just giving you the advice. Right, in this case, it was the collective view of that data is really hard to do, but AI sees all the data all the time and then can say, you know what, you trended now from good performance into risky performance. And that's when we want to take action. Brilliant, have you got any examples of that working in the real world? Yes. I had a supplier and they really were doing great. I mean, we had a great cost control. They were on time. And then we started seeing some problems with you know, the invoicing. So I was getting invoices that were consistently above what the negotiated price was. And that is something that starts to set off a few alarms, right? Because it starts to create, dissonance or noise in the processing times and the evaluation and really rectifying this mismatch. And then what happened with the supplier is everything started coming late. And that's when we knew we had to take action. That was interesting because it actually we had really kind of looked at it from the design standpoint upfront, I could have started to design them out of my products earlier, but because we actually kind of see the backend, because I'm really more in the buying side of, I hit design and I'll really follow through on the product, but it's not, it was something that I think caught us all off guard that this had been such a long term trustworthy, reliable source of supply. And then when it turned, I was shocked at how fast it turned. And so it would have been great to have kind of the canary in the coal mine tell me before things really got critical. So we started to miss our production runs, right? Because we didn't have that source of supply. We had to basically recast our production capacity into other products. And that's the one thing we don't wanna do. We wanna try and stay on plan if we can. So I think I'll hand it over to Rafael. Thanks, Mark. So, yeah. Mark has shared very interesting trends that we see even in our work here implementing Coupa for many companies. It's interesting to note how the market has been shifting from companies coming to us and asking, Hey, can we implement P2P? We want to reduce the cost of processing an invoice or making our processes quicker to companies coming to us and seeing how do I manage the risk with my suppliers? How do I see, the spend that I have across my company so I can define the strategies like Mark was describing. So the companies that are leading, or they have the vision of the changes that are coming are taking action even early on, even before the project. And we're noticing that in the nature of the projects that were coming through as part of our work at Optus. So I wanted to use this opportunity to share what we have learned throughout this many years of experience, what makes the difference, the biggest difference when you are trying to tackle all of those risks, all that uncertainty, and becoming an agile and resilient company? So Mark has shared and showed all those different flows that happen between the source to pay process and the order to cash process, and how Coupa can sit in the middle and be the common language that allows the communication to flow easily. And so the technical part of things Coupa has solved. Right? If you adopt Coupa, you have all those connection points as part of the best practices that pre built in the tool. That's not the key concern to making this a success. The product is good and it will work and do what it's meant to do. But where we see the difference between success and struggle is how you implement and adopt and continuously invest in the tool. So that's what I'm going to focus my talking points here. So when you're talking about global manufacturing companies, one of the struggles for more immature companies is that each of their local operations has very distinct processes in place, not by design, but because they are working in isolation and they've just developed in their different ways. And one requires five people to do this, the other one requires this one person to do that, and one calls the manager, the other doesn't. There is no centralized or thought out way of how the company is meant to operate. So part of our work in our projects is to define together with our clients what is the common standard for the source to pay process to operate in. How are we going to get all of our spend visible in one place? How are we going to manage suppliers' contracts, release PRs into POs, requisitions into purchase orders, managing invoices, all of that. So the definition of that common process is key. But of course, there are true regional differences that need to be taken into account. So the approach that we've taken and the numbers we've seen in practice is that on average, it's like an eightytwenty split. You can still have 80% of a common process that works well throughout the company and drives all the companies goals well, but you have 20% of the system that needs to be adapted to very unique regional situations. For example, each country has different tax policies, as Mark was explaining. Some countries require you to submit invoices to a central clearing system that the government controls. Some companies, some other countries require that suppliers send advance notice of their invoices before the invoice even comes in. We see everything. And so those details need to be taken into account, but that's all sitting on top of an 80% common process that feeds into the overall company's goals and is driving to their objectives of automation, of resilience, of agility, and can manage, can drive the spend management and the supplier strategy of each company. When we're talking about those local requirements, we also see that it is very important to address the local teams locally. What I mean by that is that many companies have, it's very common for multinationals to have English as their working language, and so sometimes project leaders on the company side just assume that the project will be done in English throughout the world and there's nothing to worry about. But when we go and talk to the local teams, we realize the level of the English professions vary throughout the world, and people feel a lot more comfortable talking in their own languages about their problems. So we send people that are proficient in the local language to talk to those teams and make it feel more personal to them. That helps a lot in understanding their needs and making sure we are tailoring that 20% to what will make a difference for them. And that connects very much into the second point, is change management. Again, the technology exists, is good, and it works. But if people are not using, if your users are not using it, if your suppliers are not using it, what's the point? Why did you invest time and money into adopting a solution like this? So one of the key focus points for us as an implementation partner of Coupa is to drive the change management. So not only taking into account standard change management processes and analysis of stakeholders and how to do communications, so we go through all the standard steps that change management requires, but actually taking that local flavor that I described before, and also the understanding that when direct spend is in place, when we're talking about manufacturing companies, the operational side of the company is a very different group from the procurement teams, from the AP and finance teams. And when you're talking about more simple, just indirect procurement types of projects, the operational side of things doesn't become as important. But we are talking now about suppliers and orders that are feeding directly into the production process. So people are very understandably extremely concerned about the introduction of additional timelines or additional lag into obtaining things, interruption to their ability to order things in an emergency if they're dealing with one of those. And so part of the problem is education, is them understanding that the system actually makes all of those processes quicker and better, and actually showing that in practice. But also when we're talking about training, it's connecting the training beyond just the spend management side of things, the source to pay side of things, connecting to what touches them directly. So their generation of work orders, maintenance orders, their MRP runs, all of that gets connected to Coupa and feeds into Coupa in a very seamless way. So from a technology standpoint, it's solved, does require some work, but it's a solved problem. The people side of things is where the energy needs to go and bringing people along in that journey. When we talk about personalizing things, like for a specific company, we talk about, you know, everything being personalized to that company. Have you got any examples that are not people based that are more on the manufacturing side or on that product side? Yes. We have one client that I was just talking to right before our meeting here. They produce fertilizers, and their local operations in The US were the first ones to adopt CUPA, and the product was all tailored for that. But when we expanded into their operations in Latin America, we were faced with a very different scenario that we had to deal with because the production processes were different, the production standards were different, the goals were all very different. So the project had to recognize those differences from the start. And before just imposing something on top of the Latin America team, work with them and with the local teams and say, let us walk through together into your process here. Let me show you step by step when you are needing to buy this input here, when your stock levels are showing that it's time to order again. This is what happens in your system that you currently use and you continue to use that is not Coupa. This is how this flows into Coupa and goes directly to your supplier, this is how your supplier collaborates with you to understanding your orders. So that's the type of effort that it takes on a personal level to make them understand and adopt and realize that the system is there to help. It is not something that procurement is imposing or the CFO is imposing on them as one more system, one more step that they need to go through. It actually makes things better, more resilient, and allows them to decide on how to do things on a more strategic level, which connects to them being able to deal with all the constant variations and changes, that Mark was describing, how accelerating they are in our current world. And that connects to the last point I wanted to make here, is that some companies have this mindset that they will invest and go through the process of transformation and implementing Coupa and change management, all of that, and there will be a go live, and that's the end of it. And of course, that's not the case because change is the only constant. So whatever you went live with will have to be adapted to the future change that will come your way without you even expecting. So part of the work that we do and that we recommend to all companies that we do is that you invest on a continuous improvement mentality. So your system administrators, your users, they all need to be well trained. But you have to have processes in place for maintaining your data, for maintaining your processes, your approval workflows. So we help you set up all of that so that you have a structure in place. After go live, who are the people responsible for keeping your workflows up to date? If you need to adopt a new module, if you want to change your supplier strategy, where do you go? How do you analyze your spend data to come up with a category management strategy? How do you keep an eye on index prices for commodities that are important to you? How does that affect your contracting? That's a living system that needs to be adjusted and maintained for that. So COOP is great in that you don't need external help to do any of that. The system is accessible to you and you can do those changes yourself. And as Mark was giving as an example, the system is also alerting you to all those changes that are important to you so that you can recognize what needs to be done next. Right. So I think this is a good time for me to give a real example for a client that we are all very proud of, ERCO Worldwide. Let me introduce you to the company first. They are a chemicals manufacturing company. They specialize in inputs to the pulp and paper industry. They have over $500,000,000 in spend throughout the globe. And they were, before we came into them, they were a very immature company in terms of their procurement. And you would expect, it's a very common path that companies that are a bit risk averse take, is that they would start, okay, let's start with procure to pay for indirect procurement, just let's help us understand how to buy things a little bit better. But ERCOT took a more strategic view on what source to pay is all about. And they said, no, we should have all of our pay in one place so that we can have full visibility of our spend, we can define our strategies, we can be resilient to the changes that affect us, and get all the other benefits that come with that, right? Like the reduced process costs, the higher certainty in the spend that they're having with their suppliers. And so they decided to partner with Coupa and Optis to go through their journey. And so we implemented Coupa for both indirect and direct procurement for them, and to their credit is not a result that every company can claim. They have 100% of the direct spend visible and managed via Coupa. And again, connecting to my last point, this is not the number they had at go live, right? That was a goal that they had, and we implemented, and they started with that mentality of achieving the goals they had in mind with continuous improvement. And those are the numbers they have now, because the platform is there and provides everything they need, but the people needed to come along in the journey. And that's the type of result that you get. And why does it matter to have 100% of your spend visible and managed via Coupa? Because now you know what's happening. And if you can make decisions, you can drive AI workflows based on that data. So the more data you have in Coupa, that is flowing through Coupa, the more benefits you can get out of that. Because they set up a process that's being adopted throughout the whole company worldwide, again, with that eightytwenty mentality, the adjustments that local operations need, 90% of their invoices have been no touch. That means that once the invoice arrived in Coupa, and Coupa did a three way match, right? Does the invoice match the PO? Does the PO match the receipt? Does the invoice have all the data that one needs to process that invoice? It was all there. And so there was no need for anyone to intervene or validate. It was sent directly for approval for payment. And what it takes to get to that level of process efficiency is a lot of care in, again, deploying throughout the whole company, and making sure you define a process that everyone is standardized on. So every requisition turns into a purchase order, purchase orders are tied to contracts, And so you see a whole flow from sourcing to contract to purchase order to invoice, and that's what allows you to have no touch invoices in your spend. And for a company of that size, do you know how much time that would save? Well, and obviously money, but how much time would that save? Well, I don't have numbers for time for them, but I know their invoice processing cost is around $5 to $10 per invoice. That's what it used to be in the old days for them. They have thousands and thousands of invoices they have to process monthly. And so you can imagine how much money they saved. And again, this is just part of the benefits, right? Like the main driving goal for them was not the process savings, that's a benefit they are getting on the side. The visibility and the access to the information centralized in one place was the most important thing to achieve and all the benefits that come from there into resilience. But you also get benefits in terms of cost reductions and process certainty that are part of the results of those efforts. The other great thing work with ERCO is a great example to all is that they are continuously actively investing in their platform and the use of the system. So they've been having great results for some years at this point. And as Ben here, who's been quoted on, they continue to invest. They are looking at 2025, looking at the type of seeing the type of things that Mark has been sharing with us and feeling that they are ready to leverage the system to address those challenges. Well, I would love for everyone to have similar results to Oracle. And so one of the things we would like to offer everyone watching this webinar and thinking about how can you get the same types of results, we've partnered with Coupa to offer a direct spend as maturity assessment, free of charge, that we do on a two week turnaround, Right? So the goal here is to tell you in more details that are specific to you, to your company, what kind of potential do you have ahead of you, right? Where you are now, where you could be if you had adoption of best practices. So we tell you about where you sit in the maturity spectrum. We tell you where Coupa fits within your system architecture. So you have your ERP systems, your HR systems, your warehouse management systems, all of them have a role to play when you implement Coupa. Coupa will have a special role to play in coordination of all those systems, and each company again will have a very unique architecture and will analyze it, what you have, and tell you where Coupa fits in, how it communicates with all those other systems to drive the benefits we're talking about. And finally, the final output is telling you what would it take if you want to move forward and implement Coupa. We'll give you a roadmap of the things we think you should prioritize, what kind of benefits you should get for that, how quickly should you expect to get benefits, and what kinds of benefits you would get. Right? So quantification of benefits, timeline, and costs to get to those results. So that's an assessment that should give you enough information to get started on an internal decision process for where to invest next and how. And we are happy to help you go through that understanding. And so if you're interested, contact us and we'll be happy to connect and plan for when we can help you with that initiative. Brilliant. If Mark and Rafael have really resonated with you and you're now thinking, I really should get my direct spend value assessment. Don't forget to respond to the poll. This is only a few meetings with no cost to yourself, so you have nothing to lose. But before we end today, we have some pre submitted questions for our experts. So should we jump into them? Let's do it. Yeah. Okay. So the first question we have on here is how will human procurement and planning teams interact with the AI's recommendation and does the AI execute actions automatically or is it more of an advisory tool for the human? Well, I think I'll pick up on that. On the AI implementations that we're seeing so far, it's both. In some cases, we're letting AI just go ahead and make adjustments. A great example might be our inventory levels. So I've got my inventory consumption, I've got a supplier who's providing that inventory in a consignment model, but I'm setting targets of what I want to see as a minimum and a maximum inventory count. I just let AI figure out and see the demand, see the they're measuring the lead time and the frequency of the supplier's replenishment and let it go. Just let it take over and optimize those levels. And then we can review it on a periodic basis, monthly, quarterly, just to make sure that it's in line with the supplier and what our expectations are. On the other side, if I see the example we had was the supplier performance, I'm only seeing my part of working with that supplier. Collectively looking at all of the data is not something that's part of my day to day. So having it go through and say, I'm seeing all the data, I'm seeing enough warning signs or signals that says we need to take action. It doesn't mean that the AI should take the action, right? Because action's very complex. I can renegotiate the contract, change my lead times, select an entirely different supplier or maybe split my sources of supply, change even parts, just change the product and don't use that part anymore. So model in that case is really to have AI advice and just inform and alert. So it really is both models and all depends the data set that you're mining, that you're using and the results that you're trying to get. Well, brings us perfectly onto the second question here, which is what are the key internal and external data sources that are feeding the AI models and what processes are in place to ensure their quality and reliability? Well, that's one that is very close to my heart, because I see companies all the time coming to us now that AI is the trendy word of the day and say, Hey, can you help us put AI here on our company to help with procurement? And I'm looking at them and saying, Hey, you're still running procurement on Excel and Outlook. How do you expect AI can help you in any way? Right? So the key base that AI builds on is a base of data. And so you need processes and systems that are helping you collect data that is useful, that is correct. So when you're running your procure to pay processes in Coupa, every PR, every PO, every invoice is being recorded, and so the AI has a place to read the data from. Contracts the same way, sourcing your supplier base. So there's both transactional data and there's master data, master data being your supplier records, your user records, your contracts. And so there are the systems that you are using and how you're using them, so they should be enforcing rules and standards on how things are being processed and approvals, only quality transactional data gets stored, and it gets stored in a way that AI can access it. But there's also master data governance that is not only a factor of the use of the system, but an internal policy and a structure that needs to be set up in terms of governing who owns the supplier record, how does that get updated, how do you clean a supplier record if you are moving to a newer system? How do you prevent that data from becoming unreliable? Right? Because AI is not magical. All it does is understand the data and the underlying data and the patterns behind it in a way that is much quicker and better than we humans can do, but still basing itself on knowledge that is structured. It doesn't know what it doesn't know. So we need to provide it with information. So they I mean, dirty data is obviously the death of AI. But what would you what are the first steps a company can do if they if they are working in Excel documents and like, you know, ripped up receipts? What what should they do to to structure that data so they are fit for the future? Well, they need to focus on the basics, right? That's the key thing. If you're trying to jump from Excel to AI, it's a jump too far, right? You'll fail in that jump. So focus on the basics, start step by step. Okay, I need to structure my data first. I will never do it with processes based on Excel and Outlook and SharePoint and those things. There is no way one can manage data correctly that way. So start with the basics, start investing in your Source To Pay platform and collecting the data. In that process of implementing a better system, there is effort that you can do in terms of a data cleanup and data analysis that takes some time, and it's a worthy investment, right? What you get out of that is good. And at that point, AI is already helping that clean up and understanding of data is something that AI is good at. And so that's, you are using AI to help you become better so that you can use AI for more specific use cases. Brilliant. Now I'm going to come on to the last question because we are running out of time, but that is what criteria are you using to assess the digital readiness of key suppliers and what support mechanisms are in place to help them integrate with the new supply chain collaboration platform? So this is, I think, one of the hardest parts and it really and also, but it is the most critical key measure of success in a supply chain collaboration that's getting suppliers to collaborate. So onboarding is not something that, typical, that companies are typically ready to handle. I mean, an IT staff does integration, it does testing and then it works with folks like Optus to do the actual implementation of that as well. But in this case, you're asking a supplier to change the way they're doing business. So the first thing you wanna do is work with them and have a dedicated onboarding team, both for when you implement and ongoing. So the first thing you want is not every supplier is built the same and it's not just their language, but their technical capabilities are different. Some suppliers are really only gonna be able to use a portal or even email. Others are ready for full B2B enablement and they're ready to go from one, your ERP, say, hey, give me the order, we'll adjust, we'll confirm, we'll send it back. So you've got the whole spectrum from an email, at least you're not doing phone calls and faxes and the like, but you're going from basics all the way through fully automated and saying, pick the technology level. And here's the really interesting part. I would advise that you look at every part of the common business flow and say, you know what, orders confirmations are ready for full automation. So that's very typical everyone, every supplier is ready to get an order. That is revenue, right? But sending an ASN may not be as high a priority. So that may not come as a full B2B transaction, but it may be sent over the portal or via an email. So every transaction in the flow, that basically knits together the process from end to end has to be looked at individually as well as every supplier has to be looked at individually. So the the onboarding process is one of flexibility and saying, we're gonna niche you into that common business process. We're gonna explain what we're doing, why we're doing it, how it works, how your role in that. And by the way, you aren't seeing just your, this one customer, any customer that's on Coupa, right? You'll see them as well in one interface, one login. So it's really, it's pretty effective for the suppliers. Brilliant. Thank you, Mark. That is unfortunately all we have time for today. So don't forget to respond to the poll to get your direct spend value assessment and start your journey to a more resilient supply chain. You can also connect with Mark or Rafael on LinkedIn, and they'll be more than happy to help you from there. This webinar will be available online very shortly, so you can come back and you can watch it again. And of course, share with your friends and colleagues. A massive thank you to Mark and Raf. It's been a pleasure speaking to you today and a massive thanks to you all at home for watching. Bye for now.