Coupa Software announced a new solution to improve supply assurance and business continuity. Coupa's Supply Chain Collaboration empowers companies to avoid risk while driving profitability, increasing agility, transparency, and resiliency across supply chains, so products and materials are where and when they're needed. This new solution creates better collaboration between teams and suppliers and provides the ability to quickly assess sourcing alternatives and balance trade-offs ranging from changes to delivery dates to item quantity.

Coupa's new Supply Chain Collaboration Suite will help businesses with purchasing, forecasting, inventory, and quality control as the suite expands. Key benefits available include: Streamlined Communication: Through real-time communication supply chain planners and suppliers can easily share instant updates to quality, price, delivery dates, and more to avoid unwanted surprises or delays. Intuitive, Unified Approach: Integrates with ERP, MRP, and Supply Chain Planning solutions to provide a connected, unified view to all suppliers/trading partners and buyers.

Improved Working Capital: With more predictable operations, businesses can reduce inventory carrying costs and minimize carrying excess capacity due to unplanned downtime to better optimize working capital through a single platform for direct and indirect spend. Increased Agility: With real-time notifications and alerts, businesses can act smarter and faster to resolve issues for direct materials without time-consuming, error-prone manual reviews. Purchase Order (PO) Collaboration, the first component of the solution that is now generally available, ensures supply assurance by providing bidirectional visibility into POs for planners and suppliers.

Suppliers can confirm quantities, prices, and promise dates at a line-item level. This ensures buyers and suppliers have accurate, real-time information while automatically communicating any necessary actions. The entire purchase order lifecycle from PO generation to advanced shipping notice to receipt of goods is managed through Coupa's platform.