A seat at the table: Michael van Keulen

You only have to look at the automotive industry to understand just how important procurement is. Especially since the COVID-19 pandemic, which brought to light one important and unknown truth: when there are no semiconductor chips, production screeches to a halt.

"It takes 30,000 items to build a car, but only one not to build it," says Michael van Keulen, Chief Procurement Officer at Coupa Software.

A healthy supply chain is not only good for innovation but it’s also essential for business continuity, van Keulen adds. During the pandemic, in particular, weak points started to show in the automotive sector when chip suppliers passed over some car manufacturers for other industries as demand shot through the roof.

"If you don’t understand your supply chain, you don’t know where to start," he continues.

A better way

A leading spend management platform, Coupa helps companies do exactly that: understand their supply chain by providing real-time visibility into spending, supplier performance and procurement processes.

"We’ve always believed that there is a better way for companies to manage their third-party spend," van Keulen says.

Founded in 2006, since day one the focus has been on harnessing the power of technology to achieve this.

"Early on, we made some key foundational decisions," he explains.

Along with cloud adoption from the get-go, the biggest was the concept of building a community that would together drive better business outcomes.

"We’ve done that from the start by asking our customers for permission to use their data to the benefit of everybody, which is quite unique in enterprise software," he says.

Now, nearly 20 years later, Coupa has access to an enormous data set across 3,100-plus customers and 10 million suppliers; in monetary value, that equates to a spend of US$7 trillion.

"We anonymize and use that spend today to train our AI models," he says.

This AI Total Spend Management, as it is now known, enables Coupa to remove complexity and break down silos in the business.

"We are focused on optimizing the spending of companies that we support," he continues.

Strategic importance

When the pandemic hit, overnight, procurement was catapulted into the boardroom, van Keulen says. He remembers it clearly – he had just started with the company.

"We are relevant now; we have a seat at the table and procurement has become strategically important to the companies we serve," he says.

Now, C-suite executives and boards understand that procurement isn’t just about removing costs, but it ensures business continuity, provides visibility in the supply chain, helps execute against strategic objectives and ensures the correct risk profiles.

Without the pandemic, he believes it would have taken another 10–15 years for a similar awareness.

This heightened awareness and excitement around the industry has also sparked the interest of venture capitalists and private equities. In 2023, Coupa was acquired by American private equity and growth capital firm, Thoma Bravo.

Leading edge

Procurement as a whole may be finally attracting the attention it deserves, but van Keulen knows Coupa continues to stand out in the market.

"We were born in the cloud and have always been cloud only. That’s a major advantage over some of our competitors," he says.

Then there’s the data it has access to at its fingertips, from large clients to smaller and mid-market companies. More than giving Coupa a leading edge, van Keulen explains that this data is also the difference between customization and configuration.

"Previously you would buy software and customize it to your business process," he says.

The whole exercise would be costly and time-consuming, not to mention painful when the time came to update and upgrade.

"We’ve always been configuration only, which has allowed us to offer a much faster speed to market and speed to value," he adds.

If proof was needed, customers receive a return on investment in, on average, 12–18 months.

What’s more, around 95 percent of Coupa’s platform is based on customer feedback and requests, an approach van Keulen calls "democratic." It ensures the software reflects real-world best practices.

Coupa uses a single code base for its software, which allows for faster innovation and consistent updates. A significant portion (20 percent) of revenue is invested into this single line of code, with three product releases a year.

"That’s why we are the de facto leader in the total spend management or source-to-pay solutions," he says.

An impactful role

As a business built on optimizing supply chain management, it’s hardly a surprise that partnerships with the likes of tech company FocalPoint, web tracking and analytics company New Relic, consulting firm CrossCountry Consulting and cybersecurity company Palo Alto Networks are critical to Coupa’s success.

"At Coupa, we have always relied on our highly experienced partner ecosystem to multiply the impact of AI-Native Total Spend Management," van Keulen says. "CrossCountry Consulting has been a valued partner to Coupa for over ten years, helping our customers achieve greater margin optimization and digital transformation."

Coupa’s open platform has also allowed it to build an App Marketplace with 100-plus applications.

"Focal Point is providing customers with an integrated orchestration layer to further enhance adoption and drive more spend under management," he says.

"As the trusted custodians of customer data, we rely on partners Palo Alto Networks and New Relic to ensure our platform has the highest levels of security with state-of-the-art observability. This is especially critical in the era of AI allowing our community to leverage US$7 trillion of spend data to drive better business outcomes."

And van Keulen, who made the switch to procurement from finance over two decades ago and calls himself a "recovering accountant", has always fundamentally believed in the strategic importance of procurement and its potential to be harnessed as a competitive advantage, which is why he’s so enthused by the progress the industry has made over the last few years.

He knows there’s still a long way to go, however, in harnessing AI and other technology to forge a career path that inspires the next generation of talent.

"Procurement has just such a unique, impactful role to play in some of the big challenges that we’re facing – geopolitically, environmentally, socially, as well as governance and compliance," he says. "How can that not be exciting?"