 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 Las Vegas. Very excited to welcome one of Coupa's spend-setters from the USO, Rick Quaintan's Senior Director of Procurement and Contract Management. Hey, Rick, welcome. Thank you, welcome. Glad to be here. Yeah, so this is one of the things that I really appreciate with all of the tech conferences that we go to on theCUBE, which is many, many a year, is when vendors like Coupa really share their successes through the voices and the stories of their successful customers. You got called out yesterday during general session today. There's a big cardboard color W behind us there. But one of the things also that I find intriguing is looking at older organizations. USO is 77 years young. We think of older organizations challenging to maneuver that in this digital era and really be able to transform the business so that you can do what the mission of the USO is, which is to help men and women in our US armed forces from the time that they enter to the time that they transition back to civilian life. Talk to us a little bit about the USO, what your role is in procurement, and then we'll talk about how you're achieving these great things with Coupa. Well, I've been with the USO for four years, almost four years, when I first interviewed for this position with my boss, the VP controller, I asked her if they had a procure to pay solution. She said, no. And so again, when I was hired for this position, my goal was to get the organization automated. They were processing everything by paper. All the requisitioning was being processed by paper. It would take four, seven, 10 days for a requisition to be approved because it would literally be something printed out and move from desk to desk to desk on approvals. And on the back end for invoicing would occur the same, filling out a cover sheet, everything was printed out, processed manually. So that was kind of my first project when I started and my position was new. Procurement had been under the director of accounting operations. So procurement was just a small piece of it. So they made a decision after he left to create my position. And so again, that was my goal initially when I started. So it was going through an RFP process, looking at our requirements and then selecting the vendor that's the best value to the USO, which was Coupa. And Coupa is what I think we all love about it is it's so customizable. And the USO has a lot of different requirements in our procurements from, we have entertainment tours to our programs, care packages we send out to the military, our operations, our USO centers, construction projects, our development campaigns for online and direct mail. So there are a lot of different requirements. So I had to really work with each department in kind of setting up those requirements. And Coupa was able to do that for us. We were able to customize a lot of it. But for us, the innovation part is really thinking outside the box because- Tough to do for a 77 year old organization, right? Especially one that has paper everywhere. You guys are now 90.4% paperless with Coupa. That's a massive, that's a cultural change, right? It's huge. And it took, again, another thing when I interviewed was, I interviewed with the CFO as well. And I said, if you don't support me, I will not be successful. So they have been very supportive. My supervisor, the CFO, the entire organization, the CEO has been extreme. He loves Coupa. So he loves the app in approving invoices and requisitions. So it was really that communication, the socialization, the training, because it was a huge cultural shift. And some were embraced, it was a little tougher for others moving, but eventually you move them on because that's the new process for us as an organization. So it's become very successful. We're moving towards new modules, contracts, CLM, expense sourcing. So we're really expanding the Coupa picture at USO. So what would you say before you came on board when there was so much paper floating around everywhere? Can you imagine the security risk of all these, you know, personal information or what have you lying around on someone's desk? But what was the percent, if you could guess, visibility into where the USO was spending money prior to bringing on Coupa versus what is it today? Extremely small. The percentage would have been very small. I mean, we just had it, you know, we operate on our ERP system, it's great planes, pretty clunky. Not, you know, it's just, it's hard to see the visibility. Now it's 100% visibility. We see all of the requisitioning occurring overseas. You know, we have centers all over the world and they all have access to Coupa now because they have to submit requisitions through Coupa. And so we now have 100% visibility. And for our reporting, you know, we've been able to pull all that information and we've got controls in place. Coupa gave us the ability to put some controls in place in our approval workflows and making sure that contracts are reviewed before budgets are approved, et cetera. A lot of those things, we were able to set those controls in place in Coupa. That control word that you bring up is spot on. We've been talking about that for the last couple of days and it's the same when we were talking with Suzy Orman earlier who was one of the keynotes and when she talks about, you know, personal finance, it's sort of the same thing. We all as individuals, whether we're consumers, you know, in our personal lives, buying whenever we want from anything.com to being buyers or managers of even lines of business within whatever company we work for, we need to have that picture, that control. And control is really that kind of accountability and that awareness. Are we managing everything appropriately? Are there other parts of the business that are doing the same thing that they're maybe getting the same services at a better price than we are? We should know that. But without having that visibility and being able to control all those processes, it's an inhibitor to any business being able to transform digitally and be competitive and to really get back to your core mission. Exactly, and that's what's helping us with the control. I mean, we are a 501C3, so we need to have that visibility and make sure that our donor dollars are being spent wisely and this enables us to do that, enable us to have that total visibility and making sure those controls are in place. Has that actually, speaking of donor dollars, has this actually been a facilitator of actually being able to increase donations because the donors now have this a much easier transaction process? Can you imagine that would be a positive impact there? Well, I mean, this is more for our procurements. I mean, COOP is kind of more for our actual procurements, but what it does do is it does, creates process savings and avoidant savings, which we can reinvest in our programs. So that's where we're seeing it. That's where CFO is seeing it. We've communicated that to him. And then we're also able to provide our CFO with reporting tools. So we pull all this information from Cuba through reports and then we're able to create a spreadsheet and he can see how we spend as an organization, how we spend in commodities, where are our unbudgeted, kind of get a total of how much unbudgeted we have for a specific period of time. So we're able to see all this kind of information, he can see all this kind of information on one spreadsheet that we've created through all the reports that we can create in Cuba. So I want to get your perspectives on the changing role of the chief procurement officer and the chief financial officer. Now they have the opportunity to leverage technology, emerging technologies like artificial intelligence and machine learning to be able to get that visibility and that control, but also be farmer strategic and really drive top line or bottom line for their business. Give me your perspective on the last few years alone and how were you able to help a 77 year old organization like the U.S. so embrace the opportunities that these emerging technologies can deliver? Well I think one key is because our organization is all over the world and then there are centers that can be rule and it's the whole vendor presence and the amount of vendors that we as an organization do bring on and some of them, it's totally understandable where some of them they do need to bring on based on their availability, but what I'm trying to do and what Coupé has helped me try to do with Coupé Advantage is to try to leverage our volume, our organizational volume. That was not occurring previously. I think people were just, when they needed a vendor they brought it on because we have a lot of events, supplies for the centers, et cetera. So really trying to strategically as an organization to be able to work with the regions on where can we find synergies to kind of consolidate and leverage our volume for vendors and with Coupé we've been able to do that because we can see the span where it's occurring, kind of all the duplications that are occurring. So that's where I'm seeing a big opportunity and trying to work on. One of the coolest things about what you guys are doing in procurement with Coupé is this is affecting human lives. Give us a little bit of an overview of what you guys were able to facilitate with Hurricane Harvey, which struck Houston just about two years ago. I loved that story that kind of shared this matter. And those are kind of those spur-of-the-moment emergency type requisitions that we get and we're able to, those can get processed a lot quicker when we have Coupé as opposed to previously the way they had processed it was very labor-intensive or manually, verbally instead of being able to see it in, what's great about the requisitioning piece of it is the comments kind of audit that people can see in all the conversations. So those types of requests that are considered emergencies, they can go, get processed a lot sooner and so we can get those services or the goods out to that particular project. So that's what we were able to do with that particular one as well, being able to support the National Guard during the Hurricane Harvey disaster. And accelerate the things that really, based on the data that you can see, really need to have acceleration and all the actions that the USO needs to deliver. I mean, just in just to our programs team, they support the care packages that we send to the military. Now that we have Coupé in place, we use a third party fulfillment center. When they receive the product, the receipts are automatically fed into Coupé and applied against the purchase orders and then they are approved a lot quicker so then they can get received, kicked the product and ship it out overseas because these are based on requests that the military bases have requested to have this particular product being sent over. So this turns, the process is cut in half to get the care packages out to the military. That's awesome. Getting care packages to the troops 50% faster is outstanding. Last question for you, Rick. Some of the things that Coupé has announced in the last day and a half, what excites you about the direction that this company is going in? For me, the constant changing. I mean, and I was not in the military. So I mean, I just, we moved around a lot when I was growing up. I adapt to change very quickly but understand some people don't as quickly but it's bettering themselves, finding the opportunity, listening to the customer and really making those enhancements based on customer feedback. And I think it helps with the community intelligence that we talk with, you know, with the communities and find out what are you doing? How are you doing this? Because a lot of companies will say, well, I have specific requirements and a lot of them are pretty similar if people talk, you know, the community talks. So that's kind of, I like getting together and meeting, again, meeting other, you know, Coupé customers. And so it's, yeah, it's pretty exciting. I like how Chandar this morning, you know, showed the word community and said, really it's communication and unity. And you just articulated that beautifully. It's listen to the customers, get the synergies from them. That's why we should, any software business should be developing software. So Rick, thank you so much for joining me on theCUBE today, sharing the big impact that you guys are making at the USO charity near and dear to my heart. We appreciate your time. All right, thank you very much. For Rick Quaintance, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE from Coupé Inspire 19. Thanks for watching.