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Innovation

Coupa buys DCR Workforce to grow its spend management platform

Coupa will integrate DCR's technology into its core platform and market it as Coupa Contingent Workforce.
Written by Natalie Gagliordi, Contributor

Coupa Software announced Tuesday that it's acquiring the technology assets of DCR Workforce, makers of contingent workforce management and services procurement software. The deal is meant to bolster Coupa's spend management portfolio with software that can help businesses source, procure, and manage their spending on temporary labor.

Coupa bills itself as a savings-as-a-service provider, which basically means it helps customers spend less money over the long tail. The company uses collective bargaining to score prime contract terms on a range of enterprise services for its customers, which include Salesforce, Groupon, Staples, and pharmaceutical firm Sanofi.

Coupa will integrate DCR's technology into its core platform and market it as Coupa Contingent Workforce, the company said. Services will include the ability to approve service projects and release work orders; track time, expenses and signing off on deliverables; and complete invoicing, payments and spend management for temporary labor and projects.

"Effective visibility and control of contingent labor spend continues to be a growing priority for best-in-class organizations," said Coupa chief executive Rob Bernshteyn. "When effectively managed, it delivers a material impact to the bottom line. Building upon Coupa's Services Maestro simple requisitioning, procurement, and tracking of SOW-based services offering, DCR Workforce will provide an advanced solution for the full lifecycle of the sourcing and management of contingent workers at scale."

The acquisition was announced alongside Coupa's second quarter financial results. Analysts were expecting Coupa to report Q2 earnings loss of nine cents per share on revenue of $56.6 million. Coupa responded with Q2 earnings of five cents a share on revenue of $61.7 million.

Coupa, which went public in 2016, has relied on mergers and acquisitions to expand its product range as it looks to become a full service spend platform for business. Most recently the company bought AI firm Deep Relevance, makers of a platform for detecting fraud in an organization's spending.

Coupa's plan with that purchase was to apply the AI models developed by Deep Relevance to the spend data Coupa has collected from its customer community. In doing so, Coupa said it would create a fraud profile based on the analysis of aggregated community data from expenses, purchase orders, and invoices. Over the last few years the company has also bought Contractually, TripScanner, and Xpenser.

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