 From the Cosmopolitan Hotel in Las Vegas, Nevada, it's theCUBE, covering Coupa Inspire 2019. Brought to you by Coupa. Welcome to theCUBE, Lisa Martin on the ground in Las Vegas for Coupa Inspire 19, hot Vegas I should say. I'm pleased to welcome Max Ground, the managing director from Deloitte to the program. Hey Max. Good morning, good afternoon. Good afternoon, good night, whatever time it is. That's Vegas, right? It is Vegas. It's a time warp, I don't let you see outside. It's the only place in the world with a 25th hour. Right. So here we are at Inspire 19. Everything kicked off this morning with the general session. I was teasing Rob Bernstein a couple of hours ago when I had him on that I learned three things in the general session. He likes pizza, he likes kittens, and Coupa's platform now has $1.2 trillion of spend data going through it. And I thought, man, procurement is not what I thought it was. And you have a really interesting story about procurement. I'd love for you to share with our audience because you said in your session earlier today, you said in people in the standing room on the session, how many of you wanted to be on procurement? You thought anybody that raises their hands is lying. Right. Tell me about the procurement of yesterday, the opportunities that it's given you, and what it is now. So I think in the past procurement has been something that had to happen. It was a must have, not a place that people saw value, but was the rule enforcers, right? So trying to do that and really adding value by discipline. Whereas today, if you think about it, the value that they can add by driving savings to the organization drops right to the bottom line. So all the savings that are out there, all the negotiations they're doing, it's really a unique skill set. And something that people really should move into, finance folks when they're looking for a new opportunity, but it's a great skill set to have. Lately I've come across former attorneys who aren't practicing law, but now doing strategic sourcing, doing procurement work, people from finance, because the talent that you have to have is be able to work with people within their companies, understand their needs, negotiate with suppliers, do hardcore analytics. And oh, by the way, we're talking about Koopa. It's helped them change and implement a technology like that. It's really fascinating. It's so much more than being a buyer or being somebody that's controlling a particular business unit's ability to buy and spend. One of the interesting things about Koopa is this platform that allows what started, I think initially is more procurement, kind of invoicing is now expanded to also include payments and expenses and travel management and contingent workforce management. So what the CPO now has the opportunity to do is get this visibility across an entire business of all of the spend and to your point, make massive impacts to the bottom line. Yeah, I mean data is so important, right? In the past, the vendors had all the information. Why? Because the sales people had to get commissions. They knew exactly what was being bought of that company. Today, you can reverse engineers saying sales. I'd say it's reverse sales. I can go in there and I tell them now, I have the full picture. So if it's divided up that category by three or four different vendors, they're making assumptions of how much market share they have. I know it all. I can create a model, a pricing model and then reverse engineer it. It's really reverse sales. I'm telling them now why they should give me a great discount for the organization. And I have the ability to actually enforce that and drive the savings that we have for the organization but also help them drive their numbers on sales. So it's a mutually beneficial relationship. They have more market share. I drive better value for the organization. It really works well. Well, one of the disruptors that you're kind of alluding to is this consumerization. You know, when you go to buy a car these days, you just walk in there, you have as a buyer or as a consumer of an automobile, you have access to every piece of information possible. So the whole transactional process, the sales process is different. So as consumers in our regular lives, we have so much expectation that we can find anything, go to AW, Amazon, find anything that we want, get it delivered tomorrow and have all these information on where's the best place I can get it, who's selling it for what, how is this person, you know, more trustworthy supplier? So this consumerization element and how it's changing the role of the CPO and the CFO is really revolutionary. It really is. And so you think about it, most of us go out to Amazon and buy something and really the only control there for me, for example, is my wife has to approve it, right? So that's the only veto authority. So that's really the only difference between the two platforms. If you think about it, is there's controls in place so you're doing the right thing. But from an end user perspective, if I go out there and find the right item, and again, in Amazon, I don't have to go find the supplier. I don't know if that'd be on contract. Why do we have to do that work? You shouldn't have to. I should just go out there and say, I need this. And in the background, Koopa is working on all those things, presenting the right products, on the right contracts, driving the right value in almost as important, minimizing the risk. So across all those different lenses, you see why the value of Koopa is. For the end user, they're getting what they need. For the organization, for the company, we're reducing risk and we're increasing value. And then you have rich reporting on the backend. So it's just, it's a great way of doing business. It really is taking what you used to do, or what you do on Sunday afternoon to like rob you to say Monday at work. And I think that's really powerful, thinking from that perspective. It is, and it can be so impactful if applied in the right way. With an organization, whether it's a manufacturer, or a hospital, or a retailer, that has a culture that is willing to embrace change. Right, I mean, there's that, right? Especially, I'd love to get your perspective on when you're implementing Koopa at a large organization that maybe have been around for many, many, many years. Versus maybe a more modern, what we think might be more nimble organization culturally. Do you see massive differences in how they're leading procurement? And are you able to sort of level the playing field and show them? Does it matter what your culture is? Here's how your business, your bottom line is going to benefit. So from a change perspective, I think there's a different perception. The newer, nimble organization believes that they change easy, but it's still made up of people. The older organization, again, it's still made up of people. Most people don't like to change. But what I have learned is if you help them understand the value of it, how they're doing it, how their jobs are going to change, and give them the tools to do it, some people are going to be early adopters. But finding that one person in the organization, no matter what level they are in that business unit or in that department, that has that informal voice, that people look to naturally, that they're not the leader who's in a leadership position, but the leader from a personality perspective, get them on board. And sometimes that's the hardest thing to do. They might be the most change resistant, but once that person flips, they become your greatest, greatest advocate out there. So it's a personal thing. This is hard work. That's what I talk about in our sessions. It's going through this requires a lot of work, but it's worth it. You can measure the value on the end, but you got to help people understand why you're going on this journey and have resources there for them to help them. So what were some of the, you said you had a good Q and A session during your breakout this afternoon. Tell me some of the things that some of the audience said that you thought was really like they're getting it. Yeah, so the whole point of our session was going live is not really the goal, right? That's just the beginning. That's just the exact thing. And so most people focus on going live and the answer is congratulations. You purchased a product, Koopa, and now it's working. So what? You don't have any real data. What are you going to do in the future? Some of the questions were, as they're going through supplier enablement, the shift between procurement now taking a larger role in the relationships with the vendors. Well, that's great. It should be a balanced relationship. You know, there's a procurement role in that. And then there's the end users or the people in the organization for the business who have to relate with those suppliers. So work together. If you weren't working together in the past, now it's a great time to do that. There's some other questions about if something is not working correctly post go live, how quick, it's not broken, but it could be optimized or you're getting complaints about it. How quick should you change it? The answer is, I don't know. Measure it yourself. I mean, obviously if it's broken, fix it, but it might be something around change. And maybe you have to help people understand why they're doing this new process. If people are giving you feedback, positive or negative, mostly it's going to be negative because positive, we just go off our way. Welcome to Yelp. But if it's negative feedback, listen, don't get offended, understand their perspective and then measure it, say, is this something that we did? Is this something in the platform? Or is it just change and work with it? What I tell our clients too is in Koopa, just because you can doesn't mean you should. I mean that it's really easy to build a field, a custom field, really easy to build custom approval chains, really hard to maintain that stuff. So try to do it out of the, not out of the box but configured without as much customization as possible and then you can always improve and understand it better. Well, listen, the key to adoption is the more customization that you have, I imagine the adoption funnel gets narrower and narrower. It's kind of interesting. So you customize because you think that's the way the process should go because that's how we do it today. So if your goal is to take how you do your process today and put it into Koopa, I also tell clients, congratulations, if you had a bad process, now you have a bad process that works faster. So take the time to say, let's step back. Companies evolve, right? And so as they're evolving, if you haven't taken a purposeful view backwards and measure your organization, where you're at from a maturity model assessment, then you probably don't know where your gaps are. Take the opportunity when you're implementing Koopa to use kind of the leading practices that Koopa has. Start with that instead of going back to what you're doing today. You know, one great example of that is approvers, right? So people like to have 10 approvers because they think it reduces risk. So if I go back and look and I ask the audience today, like how many purchase orders or requests get rejected? Very few. And how long do people actually have it open when they approve it? So that three seconds when they open it up and looked at it, do they really assess it from a risk perspective? Probably not, but if four people ahead of them approved it, that person's just going to approve it because they think it's okay because they're assuming someone else is looking at it. As opposed to in Koopa now, I have the rich data to understand it and I can minimize risk that way instead of trying to do it in what is a false sense of security. So getting people on board with bringing in automation and leveraging, like I was saying in the beginning, the 1.2 trillion of spend that's going through the Koopa platform to leverage that intelligence to not only have Koopa create the prescriptions, but for companies to be able to go, okay, we shouldn't, to your point, we shouldn't take a process that was clunky before and just do it faster, still clunky. Being able to have the automation, the analytics, really those core enabling technologies can also be quite revolutionary. Absolutely, and also the insights. The appetite there? Yeah, absolutely. So the Koopa insights now and you're seeing that measured against others and it's masked, but you see how you're doing against others is really powerful. Setting your goals out there and seeing how you're doing, adjusting those, really questioning yourself is if we're not getting these approved in the speed that we thought, how do we do it differently? Right. So, and that's nice about Koopa. It is really sass, right? And they really do come out with three releases a year, which is powerful. And so it's always changing, which means you have to be nimble, understand your organization, adopting the new technologies that come out there and also looking at their acquisitions and seeing if that fits into what you're doing. Yep, exactly. Last question for you is the announcement of the expansion of their in the AWS Marketplace today. And I'm thinking, wow, the IT person is probably going, oh, finally, all these shadow IT units that are popping up in finance and marketing and engineering and whatnot. They now have the ability to see and manage the entire software from search to deployment and management through AWS. What advantage is that going to give Deloitte when you're working with Koopa customers on implementation? That's probably too soon to say on that one. You know, all the expansions they're having really help us with another tool to help clients. I would say though, there's always, you know, measuring the benefit for that client and the risk. So even if you take Amazon, for example, just open buy for Koopa, it's managing that. So Amazon when they first came out with Amazon for Business Open Buy, you couldn't control the categories that were exposed to the client. Now you can, but you can't control the items. So having a process in place, having a category strategy and then maximizing it. If Amazon works with that client, fantastic. If AWS is going to give them more visibility across their platforms to manage those better, fantastic. But I think it just gives another opportunity to bring clients back into Koopa, have a look at the value for Koopa from an end-to-end solution. And all these wraparound acquisitions they're making or expansions with their clients, Koopa Pay and all those other pieces out there. It's just another thing for them to have a goal and understand and make a decision from their business whether they're going to use it or not. But there's value across the board. Every client is different. Absolutely. But it's also that consumerization approach that if you can take a process that somebody does on their own time, whether they're buying soccer balls or a pool and bring that to their business life, that consumerization following them, you think, wow, the potential there to transform every industry, every function, every line of business. It's just infinite. So, dot, dot, dot, to me, continue. Absolutely. Wish we had more time. But Max, thank you so much for joining me on theCUBE today and talking to me about what's going on at Deloitte. And congrats on having a standing room only session. Fantastic, thanks. It's been a pleasure. It's been a pleasure. All right, take care. For Max Ground, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE from Koopa Inspire 19. Thanks for watching.