SUPPLY CHAIN PARTNER
SCP collects compliance documents, captures risk-related information and cross-checks it against government databases, giving buyers a“ head start” and maintaining the supplier data on their behalf. The latter extends this further, digitising and validating Black Economic Empowerment documentation and syncing it to a client’ s reporting systems, making South African government compliance reporting“ effortless”. The BEE App has recently been extended to process compliance documentation in the UAE, taking years of document digitisation experience and applying it to a new market.
Alpex sits underneath everything as infrastructure: SCP’ s own cloudbased integration engine, built to connect Coupa to ERPs and other business systems. It runs on a Gartner Magic Quadrant iPaaS platform, giving clients“ pre-built but configurable integration accelerators at a predefined, predictable cost,” as well as“ strong security, low-code configuration and centralised monitoring, without having to build integrations from scratch,” according to Schalk.
What ties the portfolio together is that none of it duplicates what Coupa already does, instead picking up where the platform’ s scope runs out.
“ Many of our customers’ problems are outside the scope of a platform, due to functionality gaps, and, ironically, the solution is not technology,” says Schalk. Chasing down a supplier to explain why an affidavit isn’ t acceptable isn’ t a value-add task for a procurement team,
so SCP builds solutions that“ resolve this time-consuming, often manual process in a way that integrates with the Coupa platform”, rather than asking clients to solve it themselves.
That discipline extends to how SCP decides when a new build is actually warranted:“ We understand the market, the products in the market and the customer profiles that match these products, and there are a lot of gaps.” While in most cases an existing tool just needs configuring, in some“ the gap is too wide, so SCP Tech will build a solution to bridge it”.
Making Coupa viable for UK utilities and the public sector For UK utilities, the challenge was not simply implementing a spend management platform. Coupa also needed to connect with the regulatory
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