Coupa gains 360-degree customer view while ensuring audit compliance

“Fivetran took away the complexity of managing our data warehouse and made it scalable. We were able to easily create data pipelines from critical business systems, like Clari, Xactly, Coupa, on our journey to providing a customer 360 view. Now, we can handle massive data volumes securely, giving our business teams easy access to customer insights while ensuring regulatory compliance.”

— Vivek Khurana, Director, Integrations and Data Architecture at Coupa

Coupa, a leader in cloud-based spend management, provides companies with the visibility and control they need to spend smarter and safer. Its cloud platform digitizes and consolidates spending information across travel and expense management, procurement, and invoicing, creating actionable insights into spending behavior.

Coupa leverages behavioral data with other sources to enhance the user experience. While Coupa’s platform helps its customers break down data silos across procurement, finance, treasury, and supply chain, Coupa itself struggled with siloed platform and customer usage data. These silos hindered the ability to gain actionable insights and make timely decisions. For example, if a UX designer wanted to analyze how customers were interacting with a specific feature or module, they would need to build a custom script — a process that could take weeks. By the time the analysis was ready, the opportunity might have passed or customer behavior could have changed.

Wrestling with these data silos was time-consuming, resource-intensive, and diverted resources from strategic priorities, resulting in fragmented pipelines that slowed innovation. This hindered the optimization of user experiences and impacted Coupa’s ability to remain competitive in its market.

Unlocking insights into customer behavior and purchase patterns

Coupa made a strategic decision to invest in a data team to better manage its customer data. The mission was clear: consolidate data from the Coupa app, Marketo, Salesforce, NetSuite, and Jira into a unified platform to generate actionable insights into customer behavior and purchase patterns.

“Customer information was spread out across the company in data silos, and there was no way to get a clear, holistic view of each customer and how they were interacting with the app,” said Thomas Rasmussen, Director of Technology at Coupa. “We had all this valuable data, but we couldn’t do anything with it. I knew on day one that we needed to build a new data pipeline that could break down these silos, consolidate the appropriate information and feed it into the business analytics engine, where we could put it to good use.”

Coupa needed to determine the best way to integrate the relevant information into its data warehouse. That’s when the company turned to Fivetran — a data movement platform capable of automating data pipelines from multiple sources. With intelligent features like issue alerting, delay notifications, and automatic recovery, Fivetran reduced Coupa’s workload by 4x — enabling faster analytics delivery and more efficient operations.

The Fivetran Product team also quickly addressed data gaps and enhanced connectors like Xactly and Coupa, further streamlining the process. Instead of relying on an engineer to write a script for APIs from Salesforce or NetSuite, Coupa’s data team could simply enter their credentials in the Fivetran platform and immediately start ingesting data into its data warehouse. Data analysts could then apply transformations within the company’s business intelligence tool, unlocking actionable insights to inform critical business decisions.

Coupa has also streamlined the onboarding of new tools by first verifying Fivetran support, making integrations faster and more efficient.

Accelerating decision-making and ensuring compliance

Change data capture (CDC) was a key feature that streamlined Coupa's data pipeline, offering a reliable, scalable solution for improving analytics and insights over time. With CDC, only the most recent updates — such as real-time changes to transactional and operational data — are seamlessly replicated from source systems to their Snowflake data warehouse. This approach was crucial for audits and compliance, enabling Coupa to securely store customer data and retrieve it when necessary. Thanks to Fivetran’s automated data integration, Coupa significantly reduced the time spent on data extraction and transformation, leading to faster and more accurate decision-making.

“Once I saw what Fivetran could do, I knew we were on the right track with solving our data problem,” Rasmussen adds. “I wish I had found Fivetran earlier in my career. It would’ve been so helpful with many other projects I had helped manage.”

Thanks to data ingested by Fivetran, Coupa analysts can now make data-based recommendations to improve the capabilities and design of the business’ digital assets. Product engineers and UX designers can use this information to tweak and improve experiences based on real interactions and trends — ultimately optimizing customer outcomes — and they can do so rapidly and iteratively, driving continuous enhancements to the customer experience.

Coupa is itself a part of Fivetran's connector ecosystem, allowing companies to integrate business spend insights from Coupa and join it with data from other applications. This allows Coupa’s customers to better understand their business spend data and drive product growth.

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