Technology | Workato

This immediately makes you more efficient as you always have the right teams weighing in on necessary spending categories.

And you mentioned the importance of centralised intake processes as the second core aspect of this transition?

Absolutely – centralised procurement intake workflow serves as an orchestration layer enabling cross-functional teams to collaborate successfully. The centralised intake process helps organisations gain visibility and control over spend and liquidity, prevent unplanned spend, mitigate third-party risk through proper due diligence, and increase agility to adapt as supply chain priorities change through diversification. The way we have deployed this at Workato - while leveraging the power of Workato - is providing access to users to put in procurement requests as a direct pathway to the due diligence, data analysis, legal and business justification processes. That immediately follows through the P2P platform, by leveraging Workato connectors.

In order to coordinate these upstream checks and balances outside of Coupa, I relied on a centralised procurement intake process that I initially put in place in 2017, and then evolved in 2020. In 2022, as I searched for a scalable platform to support the centralised procurement intake workflow, I chose Expent.ai, who - based on my previous work and feedback - have built a platform to support the centralised procurement intake process. The Expent. ai founders have built a platform that is scalable and customisable for all kinds of organisations with unique requirements. It has AI capabilities on supplier recommendations, contract and renewal management as well as application utilisation tracking.

Expent.ai has been vital in helping us with upstream reviews and due diligence, renewal management, contract tracking and application utilisation, while Coupa assists with finance and business approvals.