Investing in smarter spending decisions

This FORTUNE 500 life insurance company has been providing retirement and life insurance protection for generations of families and businesses. But, it had reached a key inflection point in its vendor lifecycle management (VLM) program as it tried to stand up a new enterprise procurement function that would allow the company to capture commercial value and manage third-party risk across the enterprise. Lack of visibility into sourcing and procurement across divisions meant the company was not able to leverage the best commercial value, nor identify its risks lurking within the third-party supply base. The new procurement organization would need to play a more strategic role, investing in systems and automation to better control operating expenses and provide transparency into third-party risk. After 18 months of effort, the company turned to KPMG, a Coupa Titanium partner, to steady and support the VLM program.

With the help of KPMG, the insurance and retirement benefit company transformed its S2P process, transitioning to a modern, flexible enterprise procurement organization able to:

• gain greater efficiencies and better manage third-party risk
• develop 65 new procurement business processes that standardize how the company engages with suppliers and measures savings
• gather metadata on more than 58,000 vendor-related contract documents so that many aspects of the contracting process, such as renewals, can be automated
• segment more than $300 million of spend so that categories and buy channels can be better managed with a level of insight to support decision-making.

KPMG kick-started the transformation by quickly identifying the issues hampering execution efforts and developing a detailed plan based on our extensive Source-to-Pay (S2P) experience. Working closely with our client, we identified three objectives:

• establish an enterprise VLM function that drives standardization and transparency when managing spend
• integrate the Coupa platform so it delivers the expected business outcomes and a rich user experience
• help ensure that third-party risk is managed in alignment with the company’s risk appetite.

We re-energized the project by taking a wide-ranging view, guiding key stakeholders through 40 workshops to make hundreds of design decisions while helping them understand upstream and downstream impacts.

Central to our plan were our KPMG Powered Procurement approach to accelerate transformation and our cognitive contract management (CCM) solution to automate the extraction and upload key contract metadata.

Powered Procurement is a preconfigured cloud implementation approach embedded with years of leading practices and enhanced with automation. At its heart is a prebuilt target operating model showing how people, processes, and governance make technology successful and shape how transformation plays through every layer of the organization to drive user adoption.

In 12 months, KPMG helped the organization design and implement an entire Source-to-Pay operating model, including a new enterprise procurement function and key linkages with the company’s third-party risk management program.

Based on our experience deploying more Coupa implementations than any other service provider, we successfully designed, configured, integrated, and rolled out the platform for over 3,000 users, conducting multiple training and change management activities along the way. We also used our CCM solution to ingest and extract key metadata for over 17,000 contracts uploaded to the Coupa system.

By capitalizing on the efficiencies gained from the new enterprise procurement function, our client can now further invest in the systems and automation critical to its overall digital transformation strategy.

Don’t let perfection get in the way of operational readiness

It doesn’t pay to extend deadlines. Teams can get project fatigue or the project can wither and die on the vine. It’s important to know when the project is good enough to proceed. Once it’s up and running, you can always start to build on that baseline but meanwhile, you’re gaining the benefits.

You can never do too much change management

We conducted over 40 workshops during the design and configuration phase as a way to proactively engage key stakeholders and invite them to contribute to the transformation and champion the changes. Then, when we trained more than 3,000 users on the new platform, they were much more open to learning new processes.