Deploying Coupa to Expand Quality Care While Reducing Costs
Acquis helped healthcare technology company Honor standardize and scale operational processes through Coupa's procure-to-pay and expense management solutions.
Making care attainable for all
For the first time in history, older adults now outnumber a younger population. This shift poses a challenge for our society — how do we care for a growing number of aging adults in a compassionate yet economically feasible way? Answering this question is Honor’s mission. The technology company expands the world’s capacity to care through an accessible platform that connects older adults and their caregivers to at-home care professionals.
Sierra Sollohub, Director of Accounting, is in charge of ensuring Honor's at-home care professionals and operational teams have everything they need to provide the best care and experience possible.
"Procuring medical supplies like protective masks and gloves is big for us," says Sierra. "We also handle lots of software and cloud storage costs for our homegrown platform. It's a lot to juggle, but it became a huge challenge when we acquired Home Instead."
That acquisition combined Home Instead's large, global home care network of professionals with Honor's leading home care technology platform. The joining of companies gave aging adults in more than 12 countries access to relationship-based care. It also required Sierra and her team to join spend management processes and several systems on a global scale.
"We were using the Bill platform but it wasn't robust enough to scale both companies," explains Sierra. "I'd actually used Coupa at a previous job and loved it. I knew it would help us accomplish our goals." After weighing the options, Honor decided only Coupa could provide the standardization, automation, and AI-driven data capabilities the company needed to support its new global reach.
Building a solid, scalable total spend management foundation
The acquisition required Honor to restructure its accounts payable (AP) and procurement operations from the ground up — no easy feat for Sierra and her AP specialist, who led the global implementation project together.
Because of the complexity of the different teams coming together in different time zones, we needed an implementation partner who could hit the ground running but also had the flexibility to explain things to folks who didn't understand what the sophisticated side of procurement looked like.
Acquis stepped in to help. With a collaborative approach designed to bolster operational efficiency, the Acquis team developed a plan to:
Design a Coupa platform that both encompasses Coupa best practices and uniquely meets Honor's cross-functional requirements
Streamline procure-to-pay processes to eliminate disparate systems and better support expense management, purchasing, invoice management, and payment processing
Increase AP process efficiencies through the enablement of key suppliers and their use of electronic invoicing
Create an integration point between Coupa and Honor's outside systems so data can transfer seamlessly
This plan ensured Honor could scale in the future without additional implementation work.
Supplier relationships were another key area. "We want to make sure our suppliers are well taken care of," says Sierra. "Many of them are coming in with very little experience using a procurement tool in their relationship with Home Instead. Coupa and Acquis held our hand in building onboarding templates and automating the process. They became true partners."
Now, suppliers are onboarded within a week with direct billing capabilities, giving Honor greater visibility into its supplier base. And that was just the start of the rapid transformation Honor experienced after building a tech-driven foundation with Coupa and Acquis.
Gaining complete control of spend across global franchises
Before Coupa, Sierra and another team member were stuck battling email-based procurement. Employees would email purchase requests or send invoices without proper approval. Standardizing procurement became paramount once operations spanned several countries.
"We were doing a lot of accruals and invoices after the fact. We had to input everything into Netsuite manually and there was just no way to control spending," she says.
Since Coupa's Procure-to-Pay rolled out across the company, Sierra's email inbox is no longer pinging constantly. Employees now follow a standardized and intelligently automated process for purchase requisitions. Those requests are then sent to an automated review workflow between the appropriate team members. The standardization drastically reduced duplicates and risky purchases, giving Honor complete control over its procurement operations in 12 countries.
"One year after implementation, we saved close to $400,000 just due to the review process," says Sierra. "There was no impact on our operations – we just found a way to cut out what wasn't necessary."
With maximized margins, Honor can now reinvest those savings towards tech innovation for its platform to ensure every adult receives the highest quality care.
Bringing clarity to data
Moving away from separate systems and disjointed procurement and accounts payable processes is helping Honor unify data across its global operations. Previously, Sierra had no way to run a proper audit. She had to go back and check emails, sometimes not finding what she needed because it was in another person's inbox.
Another area of particular importance was tracking corporate card purchases. All financial data related to those purchases were trapped in a separate system, making it difficult for Honor's AP team to control payments and understand its true financial position. After implementing Coupa, Honor is phasing out large spending on corporate cards and instead using punchouts for hardware needs and virtual cards and POs for anything else. The switch not only guarantees payment timing, but gives Honor's AP team greater control over financing while meeting the company's procurement needs.
"I wasted a lot of time trying to find information," Sierra says. "Now, I can instantly pull a report, look back, and do a cost analysis. We've never had that level of clarity and visibility before."
With a granular and real-time view of financial data, Honor can better control cash flows, reduce risk, and make informed business decisions. The financial visibility is also helping the company communicate more confidently with investors, leading to greater opportunities for future growth.
"We are looking forward to the future and additional ways to improve our processes and employee experience. We have just scratched the surface of what is possible thanks to easy data availability and central controls," Sierra explains.
Coupa allowed us to see where the company is and make choices about where we're going. Acquis made the structure of Coupa effective for our goals.
Optimizing operations for future growth
Next up for Honor? Tackling its expense process. The company currently uses three different systems, making it difficult for employees to create compliant expense reports and time-consuming for Honor's two-person AP team to enter the information into multiple systems manually.
Coupa Expense Management will soon be live, and all three expense systems will be replaced with one. Whether employees need to send in expenses, invoices, or purchase requests, they will soon complete all of these in the same manner on one platform.
"I'm really looking forward to training everyone on one tool and one process," Sierra says. "It's going to make my job easier, and most importantly, their job easier, so they can focus on the mission of delivering quality care to folks."
Ready to unlock the value of Coupa?
Connect with us to get started