The Professor
As usual, a day late and a penny short due to the overwhelming interest in my new startup Coupa, I’m pleased to bring you my vieww on what the “Top 3″ issues are holding purchasing departments back.
First, some housekeeping. Michael L. of Sourcing Innovation came up with the idea for this series. Imho, he provides [...]
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With all the politicizing of climate change, it’s tough not to get the ‘Chicken Little - The Sky Is Falling’ feeling when hearing scientists talk about the tough changes seemingly in store for us.
Here are a few links you may want to follow & read:
- NY Times Article: “Emissions Already Affecting Climate, Report Says”
- Intergovernmental [...]
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The Purchasing managers’ index slid this month, dropping to 50.9. Here’s a graph of the last year:
Any reading below 50 many interpret as a contracting economy. The more precise interpretation is contraction in US manufacturing output.
People seem to disagree whether the US is falling into a recession, but the PMI trend sure seems to predict [...]
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I’ve posted quite a few times on SaaS before. Some posts have been positive, while others have been more challenging.
But there’s one truth I think we can all agree on - that the pricing model of SaaS is fundamentally different and very challenging for traditional vendors to match.
Software license pricing is a very interesting area [...]
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Making procurement click at most companies involves handling the req to check process as easily as possible. That’s why @ Coupa we’ve spent so much time with our initial releases trying to get the usability “right”. But beyond drag-n-drop, streamlining, and consumerizing the application, procurement flows must recognize the nuances of “what” an individual is [...]
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I got into a discussion recently about the value of outsourcing the establishment of contracts and pricing for an enterprise’s goods and services. And red flashing alarm bells went off in my head. Wait, I said, that’s just like Healthcare GPO’s here in the US. Popularized in the 90’s, today the shift is away from [...]
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Many of you may be surprised to learn I am an unabashedly proud Chemical Engineer, even though I found my calling building business software. In fact, while obtaining my B.S. at UC Berkeley I was priviledged to do undergraduate honors research for the distinguished Dr. Prausnitz. And although I turned down Dr. Prausnitz’s request to [...]
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Let’s say you manage a factory. And on Monday morning the parking lot looks like this:
That day the factory produces 10,000 widgets at good quality.
Then, you come back Sunday. The factory parking lot looks like this:
Yet the factory still produces the same 10,000 widgets at good quality.
What do the rest of your employees do? More [...]
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I’ve posted in the past about Oracle’s Global Single Instance - both the vision and the reality. And although Oracle is now about as far off message from pushing a Global Single Instance as they ever could be, there are some compelling points that come with the promise of system centralization.
[Before you get too excited, [...]
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I had several great conversations with partners and prospects today.. A standout was a call with a higher education institution that has downloaded a copy of Coupa eProcurement to play around with & pilot. It was one of those nice open source moments where you know that making the product truly accessible had a hand [...]
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