 From the cosmopolitan hotel in Las Vegas, Nevada, it's theCUBE, covering Coupa Inspire 2019. Brought to you by Coupa. Hey, welcome to theCUBE. Lisa Martin on the ground in Las Vegas at Coupa Inspire 19. Excited to welcome to the program a gentleman from Staples, a place I go to all the time. We have Chris Diorio, VP of Strategic Sourcing. Hey, Chris, welcome to theCUBE. Thank you, glad to be here. So I was just at Staples the other day getting office supplies. It's a go-to pens, file folders, ink, et cetera. You name it, that is a place I think everybody on the planet knows. But I want to talk to you about the Staples business and how you guys now have control over 8,000 suppliers. You've got this visibility and control which I think every human wants in every element of life. You now have 100% of your indirect spend under management. So given those big business outcomes, let's dissect that. Obviously you're a Coupa customer. That's why you're here. Talk to us a little bit about Staples, all the different suppliers you guys have and some of the challenges that you came to Coupa to help you race. Well, we had a lot of issues with rogue spend. Everybody was doing what they wanted in every location. We had no verification. We weren't consolidating our spend to get the best deals and get the best outcomes. Lack of consistency, all the stuff you hear about. And since we've rolled out Coupa, we've got a lot of structure in place now and we've got much better uniformity, much better consistency. We've dramatically lowered our costs through the use of the tool and some of the rules that we've put in place as a result of launching Coupa a couple of years ago now. So we're really pleased with how it's helped us organize our business and really bring visibility to where we're spending money and showing us the opportunities and where we can go after them and save even more money. You know, you talk about rogue spending. One of the interesting disruptors of procurement and finance is consumerization. We all have, whether we're going on Staples.com or something else, we're on Amazon, I need to buy this. We have this expectation as consumers in our private lives that we can get anything that we want. We don't have to check with anybody. I have one click. So then when we go in as business buyers, we sort of have the same mentality. But obviously the challenge there is a lot of organizations don't have visibility into where is every single dollar going? How many different suppliers are we working with? Do we have duplicates, triple kits everywhere? So talk to me a little bit about the, really kind of cultural strategic shift that you guys are making now that you have this visibility. Well, everybody's happy with the results. That's always good, right? Yeah, it is. When you have some success and you start to tell a story, then all of a sudden people's eyes get opened. And what's interesting is, I don't think anyone does anything with malice, but if you have a general manager of a warehouse who believes that ex-widget is what he needs to really help perform and do better, he's doing that with the right intentions. What he doesn't understand is everything else that's going on behind the scenes. And we have deals in place with suppliers and there's a level of consistency that we expect that our suppliers expect and that our customers expect and we can't have that experience be different. So once we kind of explain that story and the tool helps us see where that spend is coming from, we go back, we have a conversation and all of a sudden it's enlightening like, oh, I didn't know. Now that I know, okay, I get it. Let me do what you want me to do or what you need me to do. So that's been the biggest shift, I think, is just sharing information and putting a spotlight on things when they come up. And it happens even still, we've rolled out now a little over two and a half years ago and we still have these things come up because you get new people and people change roles and as a business person, there's folks I've done business with in the past that have earned my trust and I want to do business with them again because I know what to expect. And when people get new roles, they do the same thing and sometimes that's not what we need them to do. So once you explain the story and you tell them about it and you show them the results, they come on board. So it's been phenomenal. Everything goes back to the user experience or the customer experience. Whether your customer is an individual buyer or a business of 20 people to a fortune 500, everybody in an organization is ultimately in some form or fashion touching the customer. The customer experience is critical to delight the customer, to drive higher customer lifetime value from that customer. So having the employees on board understanding, we still want you to be able to manage your warehouse even more efficiently but we need you to understand how we're going to give you the tools to do it better. Ultimately at the end of the day it goes back to that customer and making sure that you can keep extracting value from them. One of our core values is put the customer first, always. And that's at the heart of everything we do. It's not about buying things cheap. It's about buying things at the right value and giving the customer the best possible experience they can. So there may be less expensive ways to do it but it may not deliver the outcomes we want. So it's not always about buying cheap, it's about buying and getting the best value for us so that we can deliver the right experience to our customer. Was that a mentality that Staples had prior to bringing on Coupa or now because suddenly you're starting to, you have visibility into everything, you're going, oh, cheaper isn't necessarily better in some of these areas? I think it's a corporate philosophy that we've had. I think we realize that people can shop anywhere and for anything they want at any time. Coupa has helped highlight some discrepancies that we've been able to kind of take out. I would say that Coupa's helped with that but it's also been just a core philosophy in the company for a long time. Coupa's helping us execute against that now. But you're right. Consumers can buy whatever it is. If it's a product like something you want to buy on Amazon or it's a service, maybe it's your internet service provider. We have so much choice. I think vendors of any product or service that recognize that and it sounds like Staples does from a core cultural perspective, you're already in a better position to understand. We really need to fine tune everything under the hood here because they can go somewhere else like that. They can, it's good to understand that but Coupa gives us the data and the facts and the analytics to help prove out where we can make a change and where we can help the company and help our customers. So it's a combination of both. Let's dig into that data. Because one of the things that Rob Bernstein shared this morning was about since Coupa's been public, which was 2016, they have a 5x increase in the amount of spend that is being managed in the Coupa platform. I think the number is now $1.2 trillion. Tremendous amount of data in this Coupa community that everybody can leverage and share. We often hear data is gold. It's the new oil. It is, and you're smiling, if you can actually see it, right? Extracted value, yes. Talk to us about the amount of value that Staples is getting by this Coupa community with a ton of valuable data. I would say we're at the infancy of going into the Coupa community in terms of sharing information and gaining information. I'm excited about the little bit that I've seen and one of the things I want to learn here is more about how it will work and how it can help us. What Rob shared this morning was very interesting to me and I'm very excited to learn more about it. It sounds, and you're right, and even Coupa says they're at the infancy but I think they have a couple of hundred customers that are starting to use the community to share intelligence. So it is early days, but it's also something that I think of when I go to events and we talk about DevOps community, it's very collaborative that not only is it customer-centric, it's also supplier-centric. And Staples is a supplier of a lot of other businesses so I imagine there's kind of double-ended benefits that could be gleaned by you guys from this. We hope so. I think we're probably a more unique customer than many that Coupa has in that we are a customer, we use the tool, we love the tool, but we're also a seller to you guys and to the other Coupa users in the community. So we see both sides of the equation with Coupa and it is interesting to gain those insights and see how we can help both sides of the company help Coupa's customers and our customers more. So if you look at the platform for procurement, invoices, expenses, payments, where did you start a few years ago with Coupa and where are you now in terms of all the different elements that are running through it? We started with simple PO management, secure to pay, then we instituted a no-po, no-pay policy and everyone started using the tool. It really helped us change things. We now use it for expenses. We are starting, like as I said, to start to use some of the analytics. I'm very interested in learning more about Coupa Pay or out here, virtual card usage. That's very interesting to me so I'm curious to learn about that. And we'll see where we go from there. Yeah, Coupa Pay was I think announced just a few months ago in London and we are excited to hear some more news about that tomorrow and how they're expanding that. But this visibility and control idea is so critical because of any type of organization, whether it's a retailer, it's a manufacturer, it's a hospital, there's so much shadow IT going on but IT has a really big challenge of reining in the cats if you will and I'll use cats because we all know now that Robert's team likes cats. But it's one of the things that they're announced with Amazon is, wow, IT can have access to buy all of the software, control it, deploy it, manage it through the Amazon marketplace and you suddenly think, wow, how procurement and IT are going to be aligning joining forces and really affecting top line of any industry. Yeah, I think in Staples our relationship between procurement and our IT STS department has been strong from day one. They were the biggest advocates of us getting the tool to help them gain control and kind of eliminate a lot of the shadow IT organizations as you mentioned. So in our environment we are excited about that, we embrace that, we're trying to force that out so we've always had that sort of very strong partnership with our IT team and that's really what's helped progress the tool through the company with great success with them in the beginning and then you start to tell the story and more and more people are interested in, wait a minute, you help them save how much into the budget and we can reallocate that money and what can I do with it? So it's been really exciting and sort of fun to be part of the transformation. And you guys have what, north of 17,000 users on the platform to date? Yeah, we have a lot. A lot, that's pretty quick adoption in a few years. It's a lot of people to train, to educate and to have it become part of their normal everyday activities. Well, we're going through a relaunch now and the Koopa team has been phenomenal in terms of training and helping my team with all the work that goes on behind the scenes that nobody sees and helping us develop training for all of our associates as we relaunch it because we're really going to change the tool. We were a couple of revisions behind and now we're getting caught up. So there's a lot of change coming in September to my company and to Koopa and thrilled with the help that the Koopa team has given us to launch this. So last question for you, Chris. Staples, a 34 year young business. I was just talking with a gentleman from procurement in Lululemon, a much younger business. And you kind of think, well, will a younger business have more nimble mindsets? Give your advice, your best lessons learned to your peers at older, more established organizations, going through a change and really looking at getting complete visibility of all your spent. What's your advice to them? It's a bit of a cliche, but don't do what you did yesterday. You've got to be open to change. You've got to let the, I always say the numbers tell the story and where are you spending too much and how do you fix that? And just because you love a supplier today doesn't mean you can't love somebody else just as much tomorrow if they can deliver a better value. And a lot of times you can find out that your current supplier can give you a better value than you had before if you just start poking around a little bit. So my advice would be not to stick with the status quo just because it's easy. Challenge yourself, challenge your team, challenge the people you work with. Change is good. Change is good. Chris, what a pleasure to have you on theCUBE. Thank you so much for joining me. Thank you, it was very nice. I appreciate it. All right. For Christy Oreo, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE from Koopa Inspire 19. Thanks for watching.