 Hey everyone, welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of KUPA Inspire 2022. This is day two, we've been on the ground in Las Vegas at the Cosmopolitan. Lisa Martin here with Kyle Rogers. Great to be talking with KUPA customers, partners, all the good stuff. Kyle, you are the partner finance effectiveness at ClearSulting, welcome to the program. Thank you, thank you. I'm super happy to be here and we're really excited to be a partner with KUPA. Talk to me a little bit about ClearSulting so the audience gets an understanding of what you guys are doing. Perfect, so I'll introduce myself first. I'm Kyle Rogers, as you mentioned, I'm a partner at the firm. I lead our finance effectiveness practice and we focus on a few things. So first is like general finance and accounting operating model work. The second is a lot of global business services, shared services work, helping clients think about where their talent should sit and how those global work flows should work. And then what's really important this week is we've got a deep capability and procure to pay. And at ClearSulting, we work with our clients to drive kind of thoughtful and complex solutions for procurement and finance executives using digital as a key enabler in that. And we've got a number of practices so we focus on finance effectiveness, which I lead. We've got enterprise performance management, risk advisory, record to report and treasury. One of the things that is the spirit of KUPA is collaboration, the community. How does ClearSulting, how do you collaborate with your clients? Yeah, it's a great question because we think collaboration is so core to being successful and driving good outcomes. So the ways we collaborate with our clients, at first we bring like deep expertise around procure to pay, functional, subject matter experts. And we complement that with our innovation center, which is a team that's focused on really staying on the forefront of digital and technical solutions and making sure we bring them together to give robust and powerful outcomes for our clients. And then lastly and really importantly, we meet our clients where they are. They're all at different stages in their maturity. They've got different goals and objectives. Some might be trying to have a focused, kind of really niche outcome whereas others might be transformational in nature. So we make sure that we right size our solutions to really get them where they're trying to go. When you're talking with customers that are maybe in the infancy of digitizing procure to pay, for example, what are some of the concerns that they have? I mean, I guess these days, if you're not digital, you're not very competitive. Right. Digital is so important to what they do, not only to reduce costs and taking efficiencies out of the business, but also when you think about the importance of decision support, right? So tightening the cycle time between business activity and making sense of it, using technology as core and fundamental to being successful. What are some of the trends that you're seeing in procurement, especially anything top of mind the last two years? Yeah. So what we love about Clear Solting is we've got a broad base of clients. And when we meet and work with each of them, they all have their different needs and goals. And we've been able to see some through lines across each that have started to emerge. And we've really seen three trends emerge. So the first is there's a big focus on operational efficiency. So moving towards a touchless world, taking cost out of the business and really moving towards exception-based, system-driven processes and more towards end-side generation decision support and the like. And then the second is there's a real increased focus on getting total visibility in your spend management, right? So understanding who your suppliers are, what you're buying from them, how much you're spending and really understanding, are they giving you the value that you thought you were going to get when you onboarded them? And that's really come to the fore through a lot of the supply chain volatility, a lot of the volatility around pricing, especially when you look at things like commodities and just getting real your arms around what you're spending on. And then lastly, there's a new and diverse set of talent in the workforce today, right? And the last 10 to 20 years, we've seen digitally native talent graduate into the workforce. And what their hopes and desires and needs are in the workplace are very different than the generation before them. So just giving them tools and digital technologies that will attract them but also retain them when they're here, yeah. And then also when you think about some of the shifts towards a more remote or hybrid model, having tools and capabilities that allow you to do that. And Koopa's a great example. Right, well, you talked about, different generations and the younger generations. I think there's four or five generations that are in the workforce today. Wow. And so, and you think of, you talked about the remote and this hybrid environment that we're still living in, how everything has changed so dramatically in the last couple of years that being touchless, contactless, paperless, really became essential for so many businesses. How do you guys, what do you define as touchless? How is it different than, say, paperless? Is it just another way of saying it or does it actually mean something different? It's a little different. And it's not truly touchless because you still need to have the human as part of the process, right? But when we say touchless, it's identifying those points of, where is it rules-based? Where can we use business logic to drive some system-based decisions and taking the robot out of the human as some say and really having the human spend their time on, how can I use this information to support the business, get insights out of it and focus my time on work that's meaningful and powerful? Well, work that's meaningful and powerful to them that will make them want to stay at their jobs, but also work that allows them to be able to focus on more strategic projects for the business, let the other stuff be touchless and automated where it can be so that their focus is on more business-critical activities or initiatives. Absolutely, absolutely. So when you think about things like supporting, sourcing, on making sure that they've got their strategic suppliers set up and they're spending with the right suppliers, that is so much more valuable of use of your time than reconciling an invoice to a goods receipt. Right. Right. You mentioned insights and visibility, and visibility, I was just talking with a Koopa customer that had uncovered $2 billion in indirect spend that they couldn't see before Koopa, and I just can't help but think how many businesses in every industry are out there with billions in indirect spend that they literally can't see. If you can't see it, you can't be able to make the right decisions on it. Talk to me about enabling that visibility as a key outcome for your clients. Right. And I think that to your point, it's not just that. What we also see is there's not great duplicate detection. So a lot of times our customers are, our clients are paying their suppliers more than once for the same inventory. So getting their view on exactly what they're spending, what's paid, what's not paid, how is it impacting our supply chain? How is that balancing up against our revenue forecast to make sure that we've got inventory moving through our supply chain at the right time? Visibility there is fundamental to being successful in the current day marketplace. Talk to me about now some of your experiences working directly with Koopa clients. What are some of the things that you've been able to enable? Any stories stick out in your mind as this really articulates the value that we bring with to Koopa? Absolutely. So we worked with, we just wrapped up a project and the client was using some legacy ERPs. They had gone through a period of pretty significant M&A. So they have a pretty diverse technology landscape and they wanted to find a peculiar pay solution that met all of their requirements. And Koopa was the perfect fit. He helped work them through the process and move towards where a point where every single invoice had to get manually entered, every single invoice had to get manually matched. Oh wow. Yeah, to leveraging a lot of the capabilities Koopa has around EDI and DCR and the supplier portal to automate a lot of that and then streamline a lot of the matching and on the backend, just getting visibility into who you're spending your money with. As you mentioned, you said $2 billion of an indirect spend that they had no idea where that was going. That is very common. Common. I mean, not that amount, but the fact that you don't have sure visibility into your end to end spend is very common. Are you seeing any trends towards that maybe changing considering what we've all been through in the last two years when suddenly everybody went home and you couldn't get to those paper invoices or those paper POs? Do you see more businesses going, help us out, we've got to digitize, we don't have a choice? Yes, absolutely, absolutely. So it's moving suppliers on to more digital invoice submission methods, whether it be the portal, whether it be digital PDF sending in through common inboxes and then moving it away from invoices, not going to the manufacturing plants anymore. We've got that going to a central location. If it needs to be physical, you've got one place that houses it versus many disparate ones. Well, and Koopa talked a lot about that the last couple of days about the, essentially the getting rid of the silos. I was talking with Rob earlier today, Rajah Hamoud was here as well and talking about, there's still a lot of silos out there that our organizations are operating under which limits their visibility and limits their potential, I think, to be competitive. Right, and I think what we find is procurement is historically has been a very siloed organization because that's been the back of what a lot of businesses grow on as either R&D or procurement buyers and they don't want to have a lot of control in their space. So making sure that they can have the flexibility to buy real time, maybe use a lot of institutional knowledge to overcome some process or system gaps. So there can be some challenges moving them into centralized model. But when you think about the broader business case on rationalizing your supplier base and making sure that you're getting most favorable terms with your suppliers and then also having control over when cash goes out the door, who goes out the door to is far outweighs some of the other benefits associated with having a decentralized. These days businesses in any industry don't have time to wait for tribal knowledge to be able to help determine the next direction. We are also used to everything on demand that the real time access to the data, the insights, where's the money going, who are we contracting with. That real time is no longer a nice thing to have for organizations, it's a requirement. Right, and I think one big shift we've seen is a lot of companies used to be organized functionally. So meaning you had finance operating as silo, procurement operating as silo, IT operating as silo, but that's really been flipped on its head. And they're now organized around ending processes. So when you look at procure to pay, you're touching a diverse set of stakeholders from sourcing, procurement, IT, treasury, legal, finance, and so on. So tribal knowledge doesn't work anymore. You have to have tight handoffs, you have to have tight orchestration and you need to have stakeholders aligned. How do you help customers navigate that? Cause one of the things that can be challenging is especially for maybe more history organizations that are used to and very comfortable in their swim lanes and their silos. How do you help them from a change management perspective be able to connect all those pieces together so that ultimately everybody's job is able to deliver more value to the business? Right, so one of the things that we at ClearSolting are really good at is we understand the language of each of those stakeholder groups. So we can talk to finance, we can talk to procurement, we can talk to sourcing and IT, and we understand what makes them tick and what their objectives are and how they think. So when we work with our clients, we really make sure that we have that through line around what's the common story here, the common message that's going to resonate with everyone because it's really important that your stakeholders engage and on board to have successful outcomes with Coupa or any sort of P2P transformation. I want to talk about talent for a second. You mentioned that a minute ago and you know, we're all living through the great resignation. I'm sure you have friends I do too that decided to make changes during the last couple of years. The opportunities are there, but it's important for companies to be able to retain talent. But, and part of that to your point earlier was especially for the younger generations, you need to be able to have the technology and the capabilities to enable that generation to want to stay and grow within an organization. Right, and I think Coupa has really driven value to our client's talent strategies in a couple of ways. Chiefly, it's moving the robot out of a human which I mentioned a little bit about earlier. So a lot of the activities that are repetitive, rule-based that historically we've thrown people at to try and get it done, now the system can handle that. As long as you've got your processes designed accordingly it can accommodate a lot of those exceptions. And the work that people are supporting after that is more meaningful, right? It's understanding, okay, what's valuable to the business? How can I help support decisions to do that? And what can we do around continuous improvement to continue to maximize what we're doing? And then secondly, around the great resignation, the remote or hybrid model is a key recruitment mechanism and using Coupa, which is a SaaS solution and one that can be orchestrated and designed globally allows for more flexible models, both from remote to in-person but also allows for global flexibility, right? And global workflows. Global flexibility, global workflows but also that global collaboration that I think we all need to have and that's really what Coupa thrives on, that community that's really, I always say, it's very symbiotic. Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. And Coupa being an integrated solution that as we mentioned is end-to-end source-to-pay allows for seamless integration across each of your communities and each a part of your business because then you can look at things globally as well as opposed to some of the siloed and more regional views that they had before. Right. What are some of the last question for you? What are some of the things that are exciting to you about what you've heard at the event the last couple of days, some of the future direction of clear-silting? What's on your plate? You know, the session yesterday morning around collaboration was really powerful to us because we find that collaboration with our clients is a big change agent to driving value and then thinking about your supplier network as an ecosystem to collaborate on is a big takeaway from us this weekend and it's been really powerful to see everyone working together and finding creative solutions that meet everyone's needs in a global workforce. Yep, I agree. Kyle, thank you for joining me on the program this afternoon talking about clear-silting, your partnership with Coupa and how you're helping those customers go touchless. We appreciate your insights. Thank you, Lisa. It's a pleasure to be here. All right. Kyle Rogers, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE's coverage of Coupa-inspired day two coming at ya from Las Vegas.