Corporate Sustainability at Coupa: Tapping Into the Power of Spend and Our Community

The potential for collective economic, environmental, and social (ESG) impact that Coupa can have across global supply chains, communities, and business operations is significant. Why? As a company that provides organizations comprehensive solutions to manage their business spend activities—from procurement and strategic sourcing to supplier risk assessments and prescriptive data insights—we have the opportunity to integrate Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) considerations across our technology platform to influence spend decisions at scale.

Specifically, Coupa is uniquely positioned to leverage its strengths and assets: the power of our Community of 1500+ customers and 5MM+ suppliers, the $1.75T+ business spend under management we support through our products, and the 2000+ team members who make up the Coupa “Village,” to name a few. Tapping into this potential is what makes advancing our corporate sustainability program really important and exciting for us at Coupa.

Smarter Together, Sustainable Together
Aligning to our corporate purpose of driving business value is also important as we seek to have impact within our business and for our Coupa Community. In Coupa’s recent global virtual event, “Smarter Together,” the main focus was on how communities can impact business and society and where information and data for the many creates insights for the one.

Building upon this concept and our unique differentiators for impact, we developed a vision for the company’s corporate sustainability efforts: 

We are building a community of inspired employees, customers, suppliers, and partners who share our belief in the power of spend to drive positive impact for businesses, society, and the planet.

Along with this vision, we’ve prioritized 9 ESG topics, based on internal and external stakeholder feedback, that serves as the foundation for our corporate sustainability strategic framework. Ultimately our BSM solutions, which cut across our ESG priorities, are going to be critical to our efforts in having a large scale impact. While there is much more work to be done to achieve this vision, with an inspired, passionate and action-oriented team, we have already made great progress in a short time. I highlight some examples below.

Joining the United Nations Global Compact
Coupa has joined over 10,000 companies as a signatory to the United Nations Global Compact (UNGC), the world’s largest voluntary corporate sustainability initiative that encourages companies to adopt sustainable business practices and take action to advance broader societal goals. As a signatory, Coupa supports implementing the Ten Principles across anti-corruption, labor, human rights, and the environment. Further, Coupa, along with 1000+ companies, signed the CEO Statement for Renewed Global Cooperation, which was presented to the United Nations Secretary-General on September 21 as part of the UN’s 75th and UN Global Compact’s 20th anniversary commemorations.

Committing to the UNGC was a natural step in the company’s corporate sustainability efforts as it aligns to our ESG priorities and helps us identify opportunities to strengthen our sustainable business practices and help advance broader societal goals.

Helping Customers Advance ESG Objectives
An example of an area where Coupa has been driving progress is through the company’s Business Spend Management (BSM) product platform and customer community. Under the umbrella of “BSM-Powered Corporate Responsibility,” our efforts help customers accelerate their own sustainability/ESG objectives through their business spend activities.

For example, customers can automate supplier due-diligence to decrease supplier risk and view community-powered benchmarks on sustainability impact metrics. Additionally, the platform provides measurable environmental impact through the digitization of spend, e.g. digital invoices and checks vs. paper. Stay tuned for a future blog for more info on this—including on supplier diversity & inclusion capabilities—and see this webpage to learn more.

Driving Results and Impact Across our ESG Priorities in 2020
Other recent highlights of our efforts include the following:

• BSM-Powered Corporate Responsibility: Facilitated sourcing of critical PPE through the Covid-19 crisis; acquired ConnXus, which helps deliver supplier diversity and inclusion solutions; launched page for suppliers on diverse business certification; and expanding the partner ecosystem with ESG data providers, such as FRDM and SupplyShift, which join EcoVadis and others in the CoupaLink program.
• Volunteerism & Philanthropy: Awarded $75,000 in educational scholarships to college students in North America for the 2020-21 academic year through the Coupa Cares program, which is the company’s platform for volunteerism and philanthropy; initiated internal and external efforts to support Black Lives Matter, including donating $15K to local organizations; held a virtual Global Volunteer Day with 400 employees participating.
• Talent & Culture, Diversity & Inclusion: Certified as a Great Place to Work and launched an Employee Resource Group advancing LGBTQ+, Illuminate, which joins Empower, whose mission is to unleash the impact of women in business.
• External Initiatives: Joined the Sustainable Purchasing Leadership Council, MSDUK, Women’s Business Enterprise National Council, and National Minority Supplier Development Council, to advance our sustainable procurement and supplier diversity efforts.

From empowering procurement professionals to make sustainable and diverse spending decisions to supporting employees and communities to thrive, the opportunities to collectively work together to address environmental and social challenges are vast. We are excited to advance on our Corporate Sustainability journey and continue to look for opportunities in the future to communicate ongoing progress.

For more information, please visit our new webpage: www.coupa.com/company/ESG.

Sandy Eapen is Director, Sustainability & CSR at Coupa. She resides in San Francisco and holds a B.S. in Chemical Engineering from The University of Texas at Austin and an MBA and Master of International Affairs (MIA) from Columbia University.