Benchmark your Business Spend Management Metrics - Asia replay

All right, welcome to this new webinar organized by the Global Supply Chain Council and Coupa Software. So we're very excited to have you joining us from different parts of Asia. And again, today the topic is going to be focusing on benchmarking your business spend management metrics. with a big focus on what's happening in Asia. And so I want again, again, you know, to remind everybody on a few things, just go through a few housekeeping items for this event. So while we are waiting for more people who are joining us, first, you know, if you want, you can introduce yourself in the chat box and tell us who you are, what you do, and where you're located. You can, this way you can then start connecting with different people attending this event. Also, I want to remind everybody that you can ask questions using the Q&A tab located at the bottom of the screen. So if you have questions, a specific issue that you would like to raise, you can also ask that question using the Q&A. And then of course we will answer all those questions at the end after the presentations. Also, if you want to rewatch the session, remember that we'll be sharing the link to the replays within 24 hours. So if you are missing part, or if you would just want to rewatch the entire discussion, it will be available. So without further ado, I'd like to, you know, bring up our speakers for today. So each of them are going to be speaking for about 50 minutes, and after that we will do a Q&A. First, we will hear from Madhavi Ramachandrappa, who is a Strategic Value Advisory Lead for Asia working for Coupa Software. She will present, you know, the latest findings from that report that Coupa just released recently. And after that, we'll hear from Jenny Tan, who is the head of enterprise supply chain at Prudential Singapore. Jenny will be sharing her own experience, you know, implementing Coupa and also sharing with us some of the KPIs and benchmarking that they've been doing within their procurement organization in Singapore. So let's probably— we'll get started. So maybe we'd like to first bring up Madhavi to join us. Hi, Madhavi, are you with us?

Hi, Max. Yes, I'm very much here.

Okay, you can go ahead and share your screen and then we'll get started.

Thank you. You can see my screen?

Yeah, we can go ahead. All good.

Okay, good morning, good afternoon. I'm Madhvi Ramchandrappa. I'm a director providing strategic value advisory services at Coupa Software. Thanks, Max, for the introduction, and thanks to all the wonderful participants joining us today. It's an absolute pleasure and honor. I'm really excited to discuss some KPIs from Coupa's 2022 benchmark report. Let me begin by sharing an important concept that I learned in my early career days. As a Six Sigma Lean Black Belt at Caterpillar, I was introduced to this concept of what gets measured gets done. This was a real eye-opener for me because I saw in action how measuring and tracking some of the relevant important performance indicators can influence business outcomes. Typically, what I've also experienced is that organizations first start by measuring their performance, and then they get on to this continuous improvement journey in order to get better with time. I think this is where the benchmarks play an important role because it gives you a chance to see what other organizations are doing and apply those insights to improve your own performance itself. Now coming to procurement, this is what Coupa's 2022 benchmark report aims to provide. It is a set of 20 KPIs which, you know, I plan to discuss some of the KPIs in this session today, and we will be sharing this report with you later today, and I urge you to read this report Because, as I mentioned earlier, it gives you a chance to benchmark your current procurement performance with best in class. And, and you know, this is based on real data. It gives you a realistic view of what other organizations have been able to achieve, and therefore, you know, there is no reason why other organizations can't achieve the same. Cannot achieve them. What we have also understood from our experience is that digital transformation journey has been a key enabler for these organizations to achieve this best-in-class performance. Before we get started with the actual metrics itself, I want to spend some time as to why digital transformation journey and also provide you a bit of context about Coupa because it will explain some of the data behind these matrices. Now coming to Coupa, as I— sorry, as I mentioned earlier, digital transformation has been found to be a key enabler for, for, you know, achieving this best-in-class performance and Digital transformation and business spend management are synonymous with each other, and Coupa is a leader in business spend management. Why we say that? Because we have over 2,500 customers and an incredible community of over 7 million suppliers, as well as we manage over $3.3 trillion spend under management. We provide applications to support your entire procurement lifecycle, including both upstream as well as downstream processes all the way from sourcing to payment. In addition to, of course, managing supplier management as well as third-party risk management. So one thing to note is that all of these applications are hosted on a single platform which we call as Unified Business Spend Management Platform. This is very important. Why I say this is when you have one single unified platform that manages all your spend, just imagine the power of spend visibility that you gain with it. From that comes the opportunities to realize savings, improve your operational efficiencies, and not to forget a seamless journey that your users will experience. User experience is very important because What does— what that does is it drives more adoption into the system, which means more spend to the system. And then it's a healthy cycle of more spend, more opportunities. And this perhaps is one of the key reasons why Coupa customers have been able to achieve best-in-class performance. Now the question is, why invest in a digital procurement transformation journey using platforms such as Coupa. When I speak to CPOs across the region in Asia, what I understand is increasingly digital procurement transformation is seen as an enabler that helps the CPOs achieve their procurement objectives. These objectives can be broadly classified into 3 categories. Helping savings, helping with savings, improving operational performances. By that I mean, you know, reduction of manual effort so that the resources are freed up to do strategic kind of work. And finally, you know, with the— I think the theme in the last 2 years has been about managing supply chain disruptions. So therefore reducing risk proactively and effectively managing third-party risk becomes very key. And in the last 2 years, I think procurement has been elevated to a status within organization where it is being seen as a key influencer, a key partner to enable business outcomes. Therefore, it becomes very important that we measure what procurement performance is, because ultimately it ties to these business objectives which become extremely important for organizations. So that, that's where the Coupa Benchmark Report comes in handy. It's a set of 20 KPIs which is based on anonymized data from The 2,500+ customers and the 7 million suppliers and $3.3 trillion spend that we talked about earlier. And this is across the procurement lifecycle from source to pay, including risk as well. This is not based off any survey. It is actually based on hard data. What we mean by that is individual spend line transactions, which makes it very real and hence, you know, something that every organization can aspire to achieve. And when I talk about benchmarks, what I refer to is it's the median performance of the top quartile of Coupa customers for each of these KPIs. So what I plan to do next is spend some time discussing 5 relevant key performance indicators across the procurement lifecycle and discuss about what that bench— KPI is about, what's the benchmark, and what are some of the pointers or ways in which you can improve the performance of that indicator. So let's get started. The first KPI that I have picked to discuss in the upstream process of source-to-contract is the on-contract spend. This is a very important KPI, primarily because it has a direct impact on the savings that, you know, that one can realize. It's actually the percentage of your spend that has been sourced competitively and is based off contracted rates and terms. This not only helps with the savings, but because all these terms have been, you know, negotiated and set off in the, in the contract, it means that the, your operational risk as well as financial risk is managed better. Look at what Coupa customers, best-in-class customers, have been achieving on this bench, on this KPI. It is 79.2%, close to 80%, which is huge. And some of the ways how this performance can be improved is, you know, my top 3 picks would be start developing category plans so that you can source effectively for these categories, for the key categories. Secondly, invest in an e-sourcing platform because what that does is it increases the productivity of your sourcing managers and category managers. Then they can start focusing on sourcing other categories competitively, which were not done previously. So then that adds more spend onto the contract. And finally, I would say, you know, start— make it easy to operationalize these contracts. And one such way would be through catalogs. Moving on to the second KPI in procurement. This is an interesting one because whenever we are talking to many organizations in the region, we often get asked, you know, what's the typical requisition-to-order cycle time that your system helps us achieve? And why it's interesting to me is because it seems like the organizations are now paying a lot of focus to the user experience as well, in addition to the customer experience, you know, which has always been the focus. So, and of course, you know, there is a real business impact because the longer the requisition-to-order cycle time, then, you know, there is a potential risk of your important projects and initiatives getting delayed. So, you know, 4.5 business hours. This is pretty impressive, and you might say that this is aggressive as well, but let me share that, you know, many organizations in Asia who are Coupa customers have actually been able to achieve this performance and even better. In fact, Prudential is one such example. You will hear from Jenny later on about their digital transformation journey. Although we see that, you know, on an average it's about 8 to 9 business hours in Asia, and I think this is because we tend to complicate the processes in Asia because we are so focused on compliance and adherence to the policy. So what I would recommend is start looking at simplifying your processes, but I don't mean that, you know, relinquish the control that you— that is absolutely necessary in terms of policy. But, you know, where possible, try and streamline your processes, simplify the processes. Provide various channels for your approvers to approve. It could be via mobile approvals, it could be through emails. And then make sure that you track the status of these approvals, especially for, you know, complex scenarios such as requisitions involving 3 bids and a buy kind of scenarios. So, you know, that's how one can aim to get better. And the 3rd KPI in invoicing, no surprises here. I think the majority of the focus is around electronic invoice processing. Yeah, obviously, you know, organizations are striving to move towards more automated processing as it helps them reduce the manual effort, not to forgets that when you do the manual processes, there is also this risk of potential fraud just because, you know, manual checks are involved, and then there could be a potential for fraudulent invoices because of manual oversight. Again, you know, some of our customers, 80%, but, but I know especially financial firms in this region who have able to achieve close to 99% of electronic invoice processing, which is pretty amazing. And I think my key takeaways for electronic invoice processing is, again, don't force your suppliers to just use one way of You know, submitting electronic invoices. Don't, don't tell them that, you know, look, there is this portal and that's the only way you can submit electronic invoices. As we can appreciate that, you know, we have suppliers of varying degrees as well as size in this region. Some are small suppliers, some are very big organizations. So give them alternative channels. Give them, for example, at Coupa we have 5 doors in which, through which, you know, electronic invoices can be submitted. It is as simple as flipping a purchase order to an invoice via email, or it could even get, you know, more complex using CXML connectivity where the supplier systems can be integrated with Coupa to automatically submit electronic invoices. So these, this is extremely important, and it's important to drive supplier adoption as well. The next KPI which I want to discuss is around supplier and supplier information management. Again, this is very key because we don't want our key resources to be following up with suppliers. To submit, you know, the key certificates and documents that are absolutely necessary from a supplier onboarding point of view. So this is where the supplier information management cycle time— tracking this metric becomes key. It's the time it takes for suppliers to respond to your data request in order to update their supplier information. We You know, we don't want to be in scenarios where suppliers' information has changed, but the information in the organization, it's not updated, which might lead to delay in service delivery or delay in payments. So the— again, focusing on suppliers. The next theme which we see tracking or piquing their interest is around ESG, environment, social, and governance. We see a lot of interest in North America as well as EMEA leading the way, the organizations. But at the same time, we have also gotten interest with large organizations in this region where they're focusing on sustainability-related initiatives. And one way to measure it is using this KPI, which is spend with diverse suppliers. It actually refers to how much of your company's total spend is with these diverse suppliers. Now, the definition of diverse suppliers varies. It is also, you know, defined by various governments across the world. But in general, it refers to the spend with suppliers where organizations are women-owned, it could be minority-owned enterprises. So, this has meaningful impact to the society as well as, you know, helps you manage your procurement spend better. Now, one way, I think one key way to improve this performance indicator is, you know, if it's possible, start making it mandatory to invite at least one diverse supplier as part of your sourcing initiatives. Then the other way could be, you know, participate in community events where these suppliers are invited and you get to understand how purchasing through them can have a real meaningful impact to the society. So these were my 5 picks in terms of KPIs across the procurement lifecycle. Hopefully, you know, you found it useful. If there is one key takeaway that I would like to leave with you from this session is, you know, there is never too late to start measuring your procurement performance. We do understand that organizations in the region are at different maturity level when it comes to digital transformation. Some of them are embarking on this journey, some of them have already been on this journey for some time, but regardless, start measuring the performance, benchmark with best-in-class leaders, and then have this continuous improvement mindset so that you have a focused action plan to get better at what you do. So with this, I would like to now hand it over to Jenny. I'm really excited to hear about her sharing Prudential's digital transformation journey. I'm sure all of us can learn from important nuggets from this journey. So over to you, Jenny, and— Thank you, I look forward to your exciting journey insights.

Hi, thank you so much and good morning or good afternoon wherever your location is. It's a pleasure to be here today and Madhavi, thanks for the introduction. So very quickly, my name is Jenny Tan and my role in Prudential is Head of Enterprise Supply Chain. My career before Prudential was with Standard Chartered Bank and Citibank, where I was the regional head for the procurement function in the ASEAN region. Before that, I had regional category management roles, mostly in the non-technology space. So I have been living and breathing procurement for a while now. I joined Prudential 4 years ago to help with transforming the procurement organization, and I was also fortunate to be the project lead for the Coupa project, where we implemented both source-to-pay and expense solutions. 4 years ago, the procurement function in Prudential was very traditional. Many processes were performed offline and were very manual. There were challenges with spend analytics. You know, we had very limited visibility of spend. Spend was at supply level, not at the procurement category spend level. It was challenging to cut deals, very time-consuming, and because most of the processes were offline, there was lots of paperwork and the records were maintained at different places, making data management a nightmare. It was really a struggle to establish procurement strategies in such a backdrop. So procurement back then was just playing a supporting role to the business. There was no category management, no spend analytics, and no concept of pre-approvals of spend. So we knew we needed to transform the procurement function and have a source-to-pay system to help us automate our process and gain control. So what I'm going to share with you today is the digital transformation journey for Prudential Singapore, what we have delivered, and how we have adopted a data management or data-driven approach to drive improvement and value. Next slide, please. Okay, in 2018, we began our procurement digital transformation journey. Our objectives were fairly simple, just 3, you know, objectives. Firstly, we wanted to bring all spend into a single spend management platform so we can derive greater visibility and control over third-party spend. Secondly, we want to change behaviors around procurement and purchasing by implementing procurement best practices. And thirdly, we want to improve our downstream purchasing activities and remove manual and inefficient processes. Now, from a timeline perspective, right, the discovery phase of this project took the longest time. We did not want to automate a current state process that was not optimal. So we spent time to redesign our processes to eliminate unnecessary steps or approvals before we automate the processes. We started gathering whatever data we can get our hands on and cleanse them, as we did not want a situation where it is garbage in, garbage out. We went through an RFP process and selected Coupa as our source-to-pay and expense solution. Now, from a project team perspective, we had a multidisciplinary team from procurement, finance, and IT working together. We had fantastic user and supplier adoption in the few weeks after we went live, and we attributed the success to very strong stakeholder support, a well-executed change management plan, where we really brought people along with us on the journey with trainings, clinics that we organized for both our users as well as our vendors on the changes and how it would benefit them, which I think is really important because, you know, we got to make sure that people are going to use the system. Now, a topic close to my heart, key performance indicators, or KPIs in short. I'm sure all of you have heard of Peter Drucker, the management guru who once quoted, you can't improve what you don't measure. What he meant is that, you know, you can't know whether or not you are successful unless success is defined and tracked. On the flip side, right, there is this risk of data paralysis where you may have access to a wealth of data data which is either impossible for you to make sense of or really not that important to you because it does not align with your objectives. So you therefore need to decide which metric is useful to you and therefore you want to measure. And one interesting thing about measuring KPIs is that it is really motivating, right? You will find that you want to seek ways to improve your KPIs once you start measuring it. And you need to take decisive action based on the insights you get. Next slide, please. Okay, now these are the metrics that we measure in Prudential, which we believe matter across business spend, across upstream, downstream, risk, invoicing, and they are also aligned to both our procurement as well as our business objectives. The metrics cut across 4 areas: cost reduction, spend visibility, operational, and governance. Most of the metrics have been in place since we rolled out Coupa. A couple of these are new. For example, vendor due diligence cycle time, as well as ESG, where what we plan to do around ESG is that we are starting to look at this to have a measurement in place to track our suppliers' alignment to Prudential's ESG priorities. Now, while we measure these metrics, we only picked a few out of these as our must-win priorities for our balanced scorecard. Now, the thing I want to kind of like, um, emphasize and share is that when you look at a metric, a metric in itself is derived from data that had happened In other words, you can use it to analyze what had happened in the past, to then tell you where you should be focusing your efforts on, or even letting you know what areas you should not be focusing on. For example, each metric is a lever to probe and drive improvements, be it procurement operational performance or cost reduction. This is really a huge part of our procurement transformation where we can now drive continuous improvement by being very targeted to focus our limited resources in areas that add value. Now, next slide, please. Now, next, I'll share how our metrics trended over the last 3 years, and I picked 5 5 of these for this webinar. The first one, active vendor count. Now, on active vendor count, this basically tracks the total number of vendors we have in Coupa. Over 3 years, we have seen our vendors numbers come down, and we perform vendor-based rationalization on a regular basis to clean up our vendor database and optimize To keep our vendor count in check. When you combine this tactic with implementing a preferred vendor program and then govern the use of your preferred vendors, it really accelerates the efforts of optimizing your vendor base. Now, the next slide, please. We are tracking— on the next slide, we are looking at spend compliance rate. Now spend compliance measures our invoice spend on contracts and PO, and this has been increasing year on year, and we're tracking at 99%. The strategies we've deployed to keep this metric healthy are a combination of implementing a no PO, no pay policy from day one of rolling out source-to-pay, institutionalizing an expiring contract review process to ensure that Contracts are reviewed and renewed timely, and of course adopting a category management approach to tackling high spend categories. Next slide, please. Now, catalog utilization adoption measures the POs that go through catalogs. Catalogs is great for enhancing the purchasing experience of our users. It allows them to buy the right items from the right vendors at the right price based on the negotiated contracts that procurement had cut. I would really encourage if you have a source-to-pay system with catalog functionality that you actively pursue this. Next slide, please. Now, e-invoicing. Now, Prudential Singapore's e-invoicing adoption of 92% is probably one of best in class. The benefit of electronic invoicing, you know, is that you are really eliminating paper invoices. You are reducing the manual workload that your accounts payables team have to carry when they have to create invoices manually. Now, if you have a source-to-pay system with e-invoicing capability You will have to get your vendors to electronically submit invoices through the system and not upload invoices manually on behalf of your vendors. Now, apart from the benefit of reducing manual work and streamlining invoice management, submission of electronic invoices directly by your vendors ensures that they are the ones doing the work to to match their invoice against a PO or a contract, thereby reducing invoice errors, reducing invoice surprises, and, you know, not compromising any invoicing controls that your organization has put in place. Now, next one, requisition-to-order cycle time. This chart looks a little busy, right? We have marked a not-so-happy face for this metric because While our catalog PO cycle time had decreased, our metric for non-catalog PO has seen an increase at the end of last year. We had reviewed our past data and could possibly pinpoint the reason to an increased level of due diligence that we had to perform when reviewing purchase requisitions on a non-catalog. Now, that also tells us that one of the areas that we need to focus on is to up our catalog maximization initiative, which is to add more catalogs so that we can provide increased guided buying to our users and reduce the need for them to raise a purchase requisition on a non-catalog item. Next slide, please. Now, this is my final slide, and I just pulled these numbers today from COPA, which are based on our metrics year to date. The numbers are showing up even better than what we were tracking last year, which is really kudos to the procurement team for consistently raising the bar and to our users for adopting the use of the system. My final takeaway that I would like to share with you when you are adopting an e-procurement system is that, one, you need to engage and involve all users of the system, educate them, and bring them with you on the journey of change. 2, leverage data analytics from an e-procurement system. Pick those that add value, track them, and use the insight gained for continuous improvement. 3, adopt an innovative mindset and don't be resistant to change, right? Learn from others. If there are better ways of doing things, faster way of doing things, then be prepared to change. With that, that ends my session, and I'm going to hand it back to you, Max, for the Q&A. Thanks very much.

Thank you very much, Jenny and Madhavi, for sharing your insight and, you know, letting us know about what's happening within your organization. So I want to remind everybody that you guys can ask questions using the Q&A tab. I see that some of you already asked some questions, so we're going to take them. You can also vote within the Q&A for your favorite questions, so this way we can push the most interesting question to the top and take them first. But before we get with those questions, I just wanted to ask you, Madhavi, just going back on your session, you shared with us some of the metrics and KPIs around electronic purchase order and requisition-to-order cycle. which are obviously quite high using, you know, your solution. What would you say is actually the current maturity of digital procurement adoption within Asia? And based on your own experience, what would be the biggest challenges that companies have when they start to digitize their procurement specifically here in Asia?

Thanks, Max. So I think the first question is about You know, what are some of the things to consider for digital transformation journey and the maturity around the Asia region, right? I think it's a function of 2 key drivers. One is what are the pain points that the organizations are experiencing in the current business spend management processes? And secondly, it's, you know, what's the investment that they have to spend on this journey? And Over the last 2 years, we have seen a lot of organizations starting to invest in digital transformation journey because of all the supply chain disruptions that the organizations have experienced. I would say the maturity is not at the highest level, but we see a lot of interest across different organization sizes. Who are getting to, you know, get on to this digital transformation journey. And this is from across different countries in this region, you know, all the way from Cambodia, Indonesia, Vietnam, Singapore. So that's a trend that we see. And some of the challenges in my view is, you know, I think broadly I can classify it into 2 categories. The first category is I think internally the organizations don't— the stakeholders buying for a digital procurement transformation journey doesn't happen. That's because procurement sometimes might lose their budget to other priority initiatives due to a lack of a compelling business case to invest in digital transformation journey. And secondly, what I've also observed is that, you know, because of prior poor experiences on getting onto a digital transformation journey, it could be because of suboptimal software or the not realizing the actual benefits that it was intended to do. So those experiences as well, you know, kind of withhold from getting onto it, and it requires a lot of change management because people get comfortable in doing things the way it's being done in the past. So, but definitely we see a lot of change happening in this area.

Okay. Thank you very much, Madhavi. Okay, Jenny, if you're still here, I also wanted to ask you, you know, you show us, you know, the journey that Prudential has taken in Singapore. And I was curious to understand exactly what type of procurement categories that you're focusing on. I mean, obviously, as a, insurance, you know, financial institution, you're probably more focused on the services. But if you could share to us very quickly what kind of category or spend category are you, you know, focusing on in Singapore?

Sure, Max. I got dropped off for a while just now. The connection was really bad. So in Prudential, right, we focus on indirect spend. So we split our spend categories across 9, what we call level 1 categories. based on the nature of goods and services we buy. Just to cite some examples, right, these are in the areas of advertising and marketing, IT, HR, corporate services, professional services, property, and the likes, right? Now, our top 3 categories of spend are in IT, and I think that contributed about probably about 43% of our total total third-party spend, followed by advertising and marketing and operations.

Okay, that's interesting. And Madhavi, just on that same question, you know, do you think that, you know, the benefit of procurement tools is a lot stronger on services or, you know, like, you know, indirect kind of categories, or it also applies very well to the direct ones?

Max, I think what it depends on the organization and the industry in which the companies operate. We see, you know, primarily the notion of a business spend management platform is for indirect spend. Of course, there is more, you know, traction to get indirect spend onto this digital transformation journey and on e-procurement platforms. And direct spend has been typically parked for ERP to manage this kind of spend. But, but again, you know what we suggest is think of human-centric design, put the user at the focus because that's what drives adoption and in turn in terms of and all the benefits associated with it. So I would say. You know, we have seen increasingly ERPs to be connected with Coupa where the direct spend also gets managed through Coupa. Suppliers get access to the purchase orders, they submit the invoices, and of course there's a lot of complex integration layers for managing direct spend, which is possible and which is something that some of our customers have been able to do it very effectively.

Okay, all right, so let's start to get some questions from the audience. We have quite a number of them and I want to give as much time as we can. Both of you, Jenny and Madhavi, if you can start looking at them. Maybe we'll start by taking those questions from the top. First one from Manoj, who's asking, what are the steps to be taken for the e-procurement journey for a conventional organization? Again, that question might apply to you, Madhavi, also for you, Jenny, if you— both of you can, you know, provide your input here.

Jenny, would you like to go first?

Sure, I'll go first. I think, you know, if you are planning to, you know, introduce or start an e-procurement journey, the few key points that you need to consider would be to really understand your business requirements, right? How they will change in a digitized environment. Look at your processes. Don't configure a process that might not be based on best practices or based on some old-school thinking. Having that kind of mindset, right, is important. Think about supplier adoption. Think about user adoption. Think about usability of the platform. How do you, you know, kind of like work with a procurement tool to make the platform easy for your users to use, whether they are your users or your suppliers? Look at the data that you have. Look at your master data. To see how you can be better, get better, put more spend under contract, get more catalog buying, get more electronic invoicing, manage the risk internally, manage your contracts, and focus on becoming a strategic partner to your organization. So really, it all focused down to getting it done right the first time around, build a proper business case, clear business objectives, and then kind of like, you know, get the buy-in locally with your stakeholders. Sometimes you need to have some pain, right, before you can gain. And the pain is that maybe, you know, like the procurement organization is really super messy, you know, a lot of paperwork, you know, a lot of kind of like, um, non-access to data, that sort of thing. The pain is there, right? Demonstrating that these are the pain points, you know, you have got a list of the pain points that you encounter today, and the pain is not just impacting procurement, it could impact the business as well. Get those pain points and then start building a business case to address each of these pain points, you know, for your business case. I think that's a good way to go about starting and to consider.

Okay. Madhavi?

Yeah, I completely agree with you, Jenny. I think those are some great inputs there. If I may add, I think in addition to the pain points, what I would say is, you know, start looking at what are the business objectives that you're trying to achieve. From this transformation journey. Assign success metrics to those business objectives and then track them on a continuous improvement basis once you go live. But I think the underlying thing that helps all of these successful, as Jenny pointed out, is about user and supplier adoption. So I think one of the key important themes is to have a strong change management strategy. And again, I just want to stress additionally that don't start trying to fit your current processes into a new platform because that's, that's not going to work. Look at, you know, what leading practices, what are the leading processes, and adopt them where feasible without, you know, compromising any internal controls that, that are absolutely necessary.

Okay. All right, we have a question from— I'd like to take this question from Stella that probably also relates to both of you. She's asking, talking about digital transformation, what are your comments to put all offline work online, such as PR, RFQ, quotation comparison, supplier selection, contract, PO, GR, invoice reconciliation, AP? So what's your take on this?

If I may start, Max, I think in my initial slides I talked about the unified business spend management platform, which is basically managing your end-to-end procurement on one platform. So, you know, exactly all the things that Stella has mentioned and why this is important. As I said, you know, it gives you great spend visibility. For your users, it becomes easier to just log on to one system to manage their end-to-end spend. And ultimately, you know, when you have all these activities automated on one platform, you know, the insights that you get out of it to find opportunities can be immense.

Jenny, is this something that you are achieving? Putting all the offline work online right now within Prudential?

Yes, yeah, I think I want to echo what Madhavi has shared. I think it's important, right? And that really goes to our initial objective that we want to bring all spend into a single business spend management platform, right? Now, if you look at the spend that we are capturing in Prudential today, we have got 2— we call it 2 categories of spend. Okay, we've got the procurement influenceable spend where procurement has a direct influence to run things like RFPs, negotiate contracts, etc., etc. At the same time, we have got a non-procurement influenceable spend which are relating to spends such as, you know, maybe rental and leasing agreements, you know, payment to regulators, things like that, which is non-procurement influenceable. Having said that, right, all of the invoices that we need to pay out to the suppliers based on what they send to us, because at the end of the day they are all third-party suppliers, right? So we put it through the system, and it is therefore important that, you know, on getting the spend into the system and getting the integration, right, to make sure that all of your spend goes to your general ledger system. I think that process has got to be seamless because you want— you've got to understand that, you know, in an organization where the business look at spend in totality, regardless whether it is Procurement influenceable or non-procurement influenceable. So they need to have a source in which they are getting all of their spend because, you know, budgets are tied to spending regardless whether it's procurement influenceable or not procurement influenceable, right? So we put everything into a platform. And again, right back to the question regarding do we automate all of our offline processes and kind of like automate all of that? Yeah, absolutely. And we got to do that into one source. spend management platform, whether it is vendor creation onboarding, it is collecting declaration of conflict of interest, right? Whether it is doing any of the kind of like e-sourcing, as an example, running sourcing events, you know, running e-auctions, getting catalogs, you know, all of these are in one system so that it is a lot easier for us to be able to get more insight into the analytics that we are then able to extract from the system because Not every single data is going to work in isolation. Everything is interconnected, right? And the beauty of, you know, making sure that all your processes are online is that you have got the benefit to be able to leverage the data and intertwine all of this together to make informed decisions.

Okay, and Stella is also adding, also questioning, and she's saying, if end-to-end process, how do you achieve a PR PO in 4.5 business hours. She's saying this is very efficient.

Yes, Stella, you know, as I mentioned earlier, 4.5 business hours might seem aggressive, but that doesn't mean it's not achievable, which is what, you know, you see our customers achieving it. I think some of the ways you can improve them is As I mentioned, you know, start simplifying your processes. Don't just add reviewers because, you know, you want extreme control. Start relying on system features such as, you know, system is capable of doing budget checks. You don't have to manually check them. You don't— you can make use of functionalities that helps with enforcing the required policies and controls that you, that you need. And so that means you have fewer number of approvers required to approve the transaction. And the second thing is, you know, now make— provide your approvers with having the ability to review and approve via email. But obviously that approval links back to the application. And I think one more thing that you can do is how do you manage scenarios when an approver goes on leave? So build your escalations, build some delegations within the system so that when an approver goes on leave, you still have somebody else managing the transaction so that business goes on as usual without any interruption or disruption to your operations.

Okay, maybe the next question for you is more for you, Jenny. This is from Rachit. He's asking, in my most recent experience company with more of traditional procurement approach, And let me see, do not have any consideration of cost avoidance as part of cost savings, whereas it's very much part of the VAT and impact company profitability. How to get this change in mindset at finance for process? Maybe you can read that question. It's a bit— what's your take, Jenny, on this?

Sorry, I don't get the later part of the question. Is it asking about traditional?

Yeah, so you can see in the Q&A. This is from Ratchit.

I don't have it. Sorry, I can't see the Q&A.

Okay, so he's asking how do you get this change in mindset at finance for process? And can you see that question? It's a long question, so maybe we'll skip that one and we'll go to the next one. This is a question for you, maybe, Malavi. Hold on. I'm just going through. There's a lot of questions. So another question from Rashid. In this high competitive market environment, many mid-sized industries are quite commoditized. In this case, it becomes important to protect procurement information specific to the success of a company from competitors as critical information available publicly. can do great change of competitiveness. Any thought on that, Madhavi, Jenny?

Yeah, I think at CoupaMax we believe in this, we strongly believe in this concept that none of us is smarter than, you know, all of us together. And that's where this community intelligence, the strong community of customers and suppliers come into picture. While we are not saying that, you know, don't share it publicly, but because this is all anonymized data. So when you're purchasing an item, you know, Coupa provides you with something called pricing insights where you can compare what's the rate that you are purchasing this item with compared to the average community. And, and you know, this gives you an opportunity to source your items better. negotiate prices better with your vendors. So, uh, I, I, I don't think it holds back your differentiation. In fact, uh, uh, when you, when you leverage the data and insights from a large, uh, set of, uh, community-related data, I think it only helps one get better. You know, that's, that's my view.

Okay, Jenny, I just, uh, pushed the question to you on the chat. If you would like to answer that.

Yeah, I think I'll answer that question. Sorry, I couldn't get access to Q&A, so I wasn't able to see. Thanks for that, Max. So I think this is a very topical question in a lot of procurement organizations where there's always a disconnect between what finance identify and view as cost savings versus what procurement always mark or track as cost savings. I think to answer that question, right, I think it is really important to come up with a cost savings framework, right, methodology or documentation of how an organization defines what is a cost reduction, what is a cost avoidance, what are demand management, etc., and socialize that internally with your finance department, with your CFO, and educate them on why it is important. Because cost avoidance, right, is as important as cost savings. And I think all of us in procurement know what is an avoidance of cost, because if procurement had not come in to intervene or to negotiate any contracts or new projects or new costs, the organization runs the risk of paying a higher amount on a cost without procurement intervention compared to the cost they have negotiated. So that is really avoiding future costs, right? So I think my advice is that, you know, you really have to come up with a methodology of identifying, defining, and methodology for calculation and socialize that. Because that worked with us with our CFO, where we actually shared our approach to identifying and our calculation methodology, got that buy-in, and then we can start tracking our cost savings across these 2 areas. But of course, when it comes to impacting the P&L of finance, right, they look at P&L impact based on cost reduction, what is in their fiscal savings, run rate savings, that sort of thing. But that's fine because we still need to be demonstrating procurement effort and we need to be pushing for both savings to be recognized. Okay.

All right. Yeah. Thank you very much, Jenny. With that, I want to thank you, all of you, both of you, Jenny and Levi, for joining us. It's close to the end of the hour and I understand that some people might have other meetings. Starting in a few minutes. Some people have been asking whether we are going to be sharing the slides. Some of the slides, yes, will be shared and we'll keep you posted by email. I also want to remind all of you that this session has been recorded, so if you want to rewatch or if you came late and you want to watch the entire session, we'll be sharing the link within the next 24 hours by email again. We also appreciate if you can send us, give us your feedback on the session. So when you leave that session, you will be asked to give us your feedback quickly, just in a few questions. So again, we appreciate your feedback. Thank you very much, Jenny. Thanks, Madhavi, again for joining us and sharing your insight. That was an interesting discussion. We also would like to remind everybody that there is a report available. We'll be sharing the link to the report in the email, thank you email that we're going to be sending you. So if you're interested to hear and understand a bit more about metrics and KPIs that Coupa can bring to you, you will have access to the full report. Thank you for joining us, and again, we'll see you next time.

Thank you, Max, for having me.

Thank you, Max. Thanks, Madhavi. Thanks, everyone.

Bye now.