How Indian IT Teams Help US Law Firms Modernise Procurement with Coupa

The real cost of running procurement without a shared system

Procurement affects almost every department in any large organisation. It's important to have a central system; if there is not, every team will follow their own processes. Purchase requests can come from email or manual forms, tracking approvals in inboxes for lost. Vendor information can also be scattered between multiple spreadsheets with no clear owner. It creates much extra work; creating purchase orders manually can have multiple errors. It can take a lot of time with manual effort in matching invoices to purchase orders and finance teams may not have exact data on what amount the organisation is actually spending. If the invoice approvals are delayed, it can lead to late vendor payments. Unauthorised spending can also be harder to find and prevent. For any law firm, procurement is very important for daily operations and compliance. So, not having clear visibility, its is efficiently issue as well as a control problem.

What a properly configured Procure-to-Pay platform actually does

In an engagement, a US law firm moved its procurement to Coupa, it is a third-party procure-to-pay platform. The platform supported the firm's entire purchasing process. An employee can search, can add items to the cart, and enter all the important details to create a requisition. The system sends the details to the right approvers. Once the request gets approval, the purchase order is created and directly goes to the vendor without any manual work. The vendor has to submit the invoice against the purchase order; after this, the invoice gets checked and approved. After checking and approval, the payment process starts.

The platform also supports vendor management; users can create a new vendor and can select any existing vendor. It provides spend visibility dashboards and reports to help with policy compliance and audits. This does not mean replacing a good purchase decision. It is a process that once depended on emails, spreadsheets and manual work and it makes it self-service, trackable, and auditable from request to payment.

Why testing this kind of platform requires more than checking a requirements document

It is part of the work of setting up a platform like this, and the second part is to check: is it doing the actual work the way the business operates, which can be even more difficult. In this engagement, the actual requirements are not fully provided by stakeholders, so the testing is only based on the available document has missed some important gaps. Instead of this, the testing team worked directly with business users and studied the complete purchase-to-pay workflow. Testing focused on requisition creation, approval routing, PO generation, invoice processing, vendor management and payment workflows. This process-based approach found problems that may not have been seen with the documentation alone. This work continues after going live; ongoing BAU support is still provided and an active effort is in progress to integrate the platform with a new ERP system, which is planned to replace the firm's existing SAP setup.

How EICE Technology configures and validates procurement platforms for US law firms

As an Indian IT company, we specialize in procurement process automation and enterprise platform QA testing. For this engagement, we customised and configured Coupa and led the testing and validation work described above. Coupa is a third-party platform which we did not build. We manage the configuration, process analysis and detailed QA that is needed to make the platform work with the actual firm's process. Our work is supported by ISO 27001 and ISO/IEC 20000 certifications, along with CMMI Level 3 and ISO 9001. See more on our Services pages.