Enterprise Manufacturer Identifies $5M in Savings and Eliminates Maverick Spend via Coupa BSM

This industrial manufacturer had grown through acquisition to operate six production facilities across the US, Germany, and Malaysia. Each facility maintained its own procurement processes — some paper-based, some using basic email-approval chains, and two using outdated legacy sourcing tools that were incompatible with each other. The result was a procurement organisation that had no unified view of spend. Flowtaris conducted a 6-week spend analysis at project inception. The findings were stark: 41% of all purchase orders were raised outside negotiated supplier contracts — what procurement professionals call "maverick spend." Because supplier contracts were stored in disparate SharePoint folders without automated enforcement, buyers could — and did — purchase from non-preferred vendors at significantly higher prices. In one documented case, a German facility was purchasing a high-volume industrial component at 2.3x the negotiated group price from a preferred supplier. Invoice processing was equally dysfunctional. The accounts payable team across all six plants was manually keying invoice data into Oracle ERP at a documented cost of $18 per invoice. With 22,000 invoices processed annually, the total AP processing cost exceeded $396,000 per year — before accounting for late payment penalties from supplier disputes, which totalled $480,000 in the prior fiscal year. Supplier onboarding averaged 45 days due to manual compliance document collection, tax verification, and bank detail validation.

Flowtaris executed a full Coupa Business Spend Management deployment across all six facilities simultaneously, with a phased go-live strategy that prioritised the highest-spend facilities first. Procurement Transformation: We mapped and configured 156 distinct approval workflows in Coupa — tailored by business unit, commodity category, geographic entity, and spend threshold. All existing supplier contracts were digitised, structured, and loaded into Coupa's contract repository with automated compliance rules that flagged any purchase order raised against a non-preferred supplier in real time. Buyers can no longer route around contracts without a documented exception approval. Oracle ERP Integration: Flowtaris built a production-grade integration between Coupa and Oracle ERP Cloud using Coupa's Open Business Network (cXML) connectors, supplemented by a custom middleware layer for complex PO transformation logic. Purchase orders, goods receipts, and invoice approvals now flow bidirectionally between Coupa and Oracle — enabling true three-way matching at scale. Supplier Enablement Portal: A branded self-service supplier portal was deployed, reducing onboarding from 45 days to 3 by automating DUNS verification, tax certificate collection (W-9, W-8BEN, VAT), and bank detail validation via Coupa's Pay network. Coupa AI Spend Analytics: Flowtaris configured Coupa's machine learning spend classification engine against the manufacturer's historical PO data. Within 30 days of go-live, the system had identified 23 consolidation opportunities across commodity categories, surfacing the initial $12M in documented savings.