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Coupa's Accelerated S3 Data Lake with Fivetran: A Case Study
Technology Category
- Cybersecurity & Privacy - Intrusion Detection
- Platform as a Service (PaaS) - Application Development Platforms
Applicable Industries
- Finance & Insurance
Applicable Functions
- Procurement
- Warehouse & Inventory Management
Use Cases
- Behavior & Emotion Tracking
- Livestock Monitoring
Services
- Cloud Planning, Design & Implementation Services
- System Integration
The Challenge
Coupa, a Business Spend Management (BSM) company, provides a cloud platform that digitizes and consolidates spending information across various sectors, creating actionable insights into spending behavior. However, Coupa faced challenges with its own data about its platform and customer usage. The data was siloed, impeding better insights and decision-making. The process of collecting this data and making it accessible to the relevant personnel was complex, costly, and resource-heavy. Coupa had invested in a data team to manage its data, with the goal of pulling data from various sources into a single place for creating actionable insights. However, the analytics strategy was immature and largely consisted of ad hoc procedures. If a UX designer wanted to know how customers were interacting with a particular feature, they’d have to request the engineering team to build a script from scratch, a process that could take weeks.
About The Customer
Coupa is a Business Spend Management (BSM) company that provides companies around the world 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. As a software-as-a-service (SaaS) platform, Coupa combines behavioral data with other data sources to improve the user experience. Coupa's platform helps its customers by breaking down data silos across procurement, finance, treasury, and supply chain.
The Solution
To address these challenges, Thomas Rasmussen, Director of Technology at Coupa, and senior engineer Anna Lisboa, decided to use Fivetran, a data integration solution. Fivetran allowed Coupa to automatically create connectors from various data sources. Instead of relying on an engineer to custom-build a script to interact with APIs from Salesforce or Netsuite, they could simply enter their credentials in the Fivetran console and immediately start ingesting the data to Coupa’s data warehouse. Data analysts could then apply transformations to the data, and create actionable insights to inform critical business decisions. With the data ingested by Fivetran, analysts within Coupa 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 experience based on real interactions and trends.
Operational Impact
Quantitative Benefit
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