 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 at Coupa Inspire, 19 from the Cosmopolitan in Vegas. And I'm pleased to be joined by one of Coupa's spin setters from Highmark Health, Gary Foster, the VP of procurement. Gary, welcome to theCUBE. Thank you, it's a pleasure to be here. So we're here with about 2,300 folks or so. I think this is the eighth Coupa Inspire. Lots of energy and excitement this morning in the general session as Rob kicked that off. There is some of the interesting things that I've learned about Coupa in the last short while, including this morning, was that there's now $1.2 trillion of spend going through being managed by the Coupa platform. Tremendous community of data and so imperative as the role of the chief procurement officer is changing, the CFO is changing. You are a veteran in the procurement industry. Before we talk about Highmark Health, give me a little bit of an overview of some of the things that you've seen change in procurement and where you think we are today in terms of that role being not only very strategic, but very influential to the top line of a business. Okay, that's a great question. I have spent a little over three decades in procurement. We've come a long way from back then. There was a lot of carryover from the industrialization era and the post World War II and Korean War era, et cetera, where really it wasn't even called procurement. It was purchasing. And it was a bit of the darling in the manufacturing industry because that had such a high impact on the cost of goods sold. And as you got into other organizations, it was kind of relegated to a back office function, very transactional, very administrative, very clerical. So it really took someone with a lot of guts and a lot of vision to say we can be more than that. We can provide insights. We can deliver efficient transaction work and free up people to do more advisory type of roles. So I'm pleased to say I experimented with that early on in my procurement career. And that has been the shift that I think is continuing on. The whole buzz around digitization is another enabler to free up the talent that we have that we can put into providing insights and predictions and becoming true strategy advisors to the business. So in the most recent, I've had four teams that I've taken over to either completely transform or build from the ground up. And this most recent one, I've sort of mashed up a lot of things that I've learned over the past three decades to try to prepare them for where I believe that the profession is going, where I believe the function is going. So back to your original question, it's really evolved a lot from that back office transactional just focus on price, a little bit on supply reliability if it was in manufacturing to slowly but surely start evolving to what can you do to help us with some business objectives and do we trust you with some important strategic initiatives that we need to accomplish as a company or in my business? Right, so since so early on that you had this awareness of there's pockets, there's silos of spend and purchasing happening there that we don't have the visibility and do because we're talking a lot about that today with that's what today's CPO and CFO really need is that visibility and control. Especially as all of these forcing functions or disruptors happen like the more regulatory requirements or companies growing organically or integrantically and suddenly there's many, many areas within a business that are buying and spending and if they don't have that awareness and visibility into it, there's a trend not only is it obviously it's a cost issue but one of your points too from a resource utilization perspective there's a lot of opportunity to miss it. Sounds like you kind of saw that early on in your career that there are things going on we need to get visibility into all of this. Yes, yes and that's probably the, that's one of the foundational building blocks is to get a good handle on where's the money going. So the financial side of the house understands it from their journal entries and from their cost centers but procurement, really great world class procurement brings a different lens that the business doesn't think of and that the financial industry, financial segment of the business doesn't think of. So that's, but you're really kind of a chicken and egg thing you can't really provide the insights if you don't have your hands on the information and the information has got to be usable, right? The old data versus information boundary. Absolutely. That's very, very much the case with procurement, but you can't get bogged down in going for perfection because then you'll just analysis paralysis you won't get out of that cycle and you'll never be able to provide. So you have to know, you have to kind of have a gut feel that this is enough, this is directly correct. Let's take this to the next level. Let's start moving with here's what, here are the patterns that we see. Here's what we think is happening. Here's where we think there are issues, right? So those I think are some of the foundational pieces to the spend analysis question. So talk to us a little bit about Highmark Health, what you're doing there and how you guys are really focused on changing America's approach to healthcare, which I think would be welcomed by a lot of people by the way. Yes, we have a very, very ambitious goal. We believe we can be a catalyst to change healthcare in America. How so? Well, first of all, we think that the model is wrong. If you think about the way that the healthcare industry has grown up in the US, you went to a hospital because you were either sick or injured. You had to go to those locations, you had to follow those procedures, you had to fill out those forms, you had to, you know, you went to where the care was and you had to bend to your schedule to whatever was available, right? We've all experienced trying to get an appointment with a doctor and it's four months out, right? So we're doing, this was a year and a half ago, we introduced same-day appointments, right? So we have both a hospital system and an insurance company. So we can see kind of the whole value chain through the healthcare experience and one of the fundamentals that we're doing is we're trying to bring a retail mindset to healthcare. Where the wellness comes to you, as opposed to you having to go somewhere to access your health or to get connected with experts that can advise you or for checkups, et cetera. So, you know, you're wearing an Apple watch, you know, that's only one of, there's Fitbits, et cetera, there's a multitude of wearables that are coming. The combination of IoT and healthcare and big data is intersecting at a rapid rate, where we will be, we are already able to look at millions of records of chart information about patterns of diagnoses and we know, we know that the data tells us that if we can get people to engage in their health and make small changes and just learn more, be educated and learn more about health, we know that the long-term costs of their healthcare will go down, right? So we are looking to partner, we obviously can't do this all on our own, so this is not a David and Goliath kind of a thing, so we're looking actively to partner with breaking companies and breaking technology companies to be partners with us on this journey of how do we bring health to people and help improve their health, you know, lower their disease rates, provide better quality of life, lower their cost of healthcare, lower all the complications. You can see the graphs, right? It all runs, you know, as you get older, if you don't take care of yourself, you know, the complications of healthcare issues just go exponentially up, right? And we know we can bend that curve down if we can transform the way that health is thought of and delivered to people in the country. Well, I'm already, you've got me. So talk to me, though, about, from a technology perspective, if we think about all the emerging technologies, you mentioned IoT, millions and millions of devices, we are sometimes overly connected. Yes. What is the opportunity that Highmark is working on with Koopa to be able to start changing that mindset and bringing that retail model to healthcare? How are they helping to ignite that? Well, it's not a direct connection with Koopa. Koopa is our procurement platform. So it enables us to provide efficient transactions and we get data insights. So Koopa is very much an enabler for us in this process. What I would say is, and this goes back to the evolution of procurement as a profession, by having Koopa and other technologies at the fingertips of my team, it frees them to immerse themselves into their client's business, as well as their categories. So if I have someone who's a category manager of digital marketing, they can immerse themselves into that and they can work, my folks go, they attend senior level staff meetings. They have one-on-ones with executive VPs. They co-locate with the client on a regular basis. So we really immerse ourselves into it. So what Koopa is doing is it's allowing us to spend less time on transactions and process and more time learning the business, more time understanding the industries that they operate in, looking for innovation and bringing those innovative partners to the business that wouldn't necessarily have happened on its own. So we have this incredible network, particularly if we have people that really, really have a passion for procurement and really have a passion for being intimate with the customer. I know it's an overused phrase, but the trusted advisor status is definitely where we should be. That's, you know, the Koopa platform and tools enable my team to have, to bring those insights and those opportunities to the business. And we've gotten tremendous accolades from the CEO through the entire C-suite about the level of business partnership that the procurement organization has with all of the various areas of the Highmark organization. So you have this visibility now that you didn't have before with Koopa, this control. Sounds like your resources and different parts of the organization are much better able to use their time to be strategic on other projects and to really start bringing that retail experience out there. So Koopa kind of, as you mentioned, as an enabler is really kind of foundational to that. I know you've actually won some awards. I think Rob Bernstein actually mentioned this on stage this morning that you took top honors at the procurement leaders inaugural America's procurement awards. You've also been recognized as a procurement leader of the year for transforming Highmark health. So what I love about the story is it's showing how procurement, not only has it transitioned tremendously to be very strategic, but you're helping to transform an industry by getting this visibility on everywhere where there's spend there that operationally Highmark health seems to have a big leg up. Yes, yeah, no one could be everywhere at once. And if we can earn that trust, then the people in the business who are hired to play certain roles, strategy, development or whatever, if they will let us help them with our expertise, they can spend, they're more effective in their role because they're not doing procurement work. They're not talking to suppliers. They're not negotiating deals. They're not looking, you know, and let us provide that service, that professional service to them really as a consultant, as an advisor, and bring companies that the more we get in depth into understanding the industries that we're buying in, the more we're learning about emerging companies. You know, who are the innovators? Who are the disruptors? Bringing those organizations because we're studying that in our markets to our business partner and making that introduction which sparks an idea, which sparks an opportunity for the two to work together collaboratively on something new or to resolve an issue that has not been addressed and no one's found an answer to in the past. Well, you've put this really strong foundation in place that not only gives you the visibility and control, but it's going to allow Highmark Health on this ambitious goal, as you mentioned, about bringing wellness to us. And of course, there's the whole, oh, there's the human in the way. So maybe tomorrow, Deepak Chopra, who's keynoteing, will be able to give you guys some insight into how to help these people, and it's all of us people, right? Really embrace mindfulness to be able to focus more on our passions, but what you guys are doing to transform healthcare is really inspirational. So Gary, thank you. Thank you very much. For joining me on theCUBE today. It was a pleasure. Likewise, for Gary Foster, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE from Koopa Inspire 19. Thanks for watching.