SUPPLY CHAIN PARTNER

team comes down to the gap between what a platform can do out of the box and what a client ideally needs.

“ Our aim is to have our customers achieve Peak Procurement Performance,” he says.“ When we implement Coupa it’ s a huge step in the right direction, but it cannot always be everything to everyone.” This is precisely why Coupa built its App Marketplace: to give partners room to extend the platform for customerspecific requirements. The gap is sharpest in the sectors SCP knows best.

“ SCP has a legacy in mining, banking and pharma, so we understand the issues and regulatory demands our customers in these areas have to deal with,” Schalk explains.“ We have a lot of smart people working at SCP, so we decided to create an innovation team to solve these specific problems to help our customers achieve their procurement objectives.”

That team’ s output now spans eight applications, each aimed at a different bottleneck in the procurement process. UNIO, for example, addresses a compliance problem specific to UK public sector and utilities customers.

“ UNIO helps our public sector and utilities customers in the UK to be compliant with public procurement transformation by openly sharing their procurement process in the Central Digital Platform( CDP),” says Schalk. It gives users a single, familiar interface, Coupa itself, and,“ with a click of a button,” synchronises projects, sourcing events and contracts with the CDP.

nsKnox Connect tackles a different problem: verifying who a supplier’ s bank account actually belongs to. Schalk describes nsKnox as“ a fantastic bank account verification service,” and nsKnox Connect as the integration that“ allows our customer to verify banking details right in Coupa as part of the supplier lifecycle”.

Metron is narrower still, built for mining and manufacturing clients whose contracts carry built-in price-adjustment formulas. Tracking the underlying indices and calculating the resulting price increases is, in Schalk’ s words,“ tedious, error-prone and not a value-add effort”, so Metron takes over that tracking and runs the adjustments automatically.

Convene and the BEE App work as a pair, both aimed at supplier onboarding for mining clients. The former is a supplier pre-registration and intake tool to gather information about suppliers looking to trade with a mine.

18 scp-worldwide. com