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Encourage User Adoption

The keys to increasing employee adoption are to deliver on-going training, consistently support users, and to recognize and respond to changing employee needs. Actively listen to your users, understanding what works and what does not, and what is truly critical to them, both immediately after going live and over the long term. Remain flexible and make changes in your business processes and Coupa configurations as soon as changes are identified. Reinforce adoption by “turning off” previous methods for placing new orders.

Here are some key steps you can take to increase adoption:
  1. Communicate to users
  2. Support users
  3. Measure adoption
  4. Encourage adoption
  5. Mandate reporting
  6. Turn off the legacy system

Communicate to Users

Communicate to your users about the new procurement process and the benefits and efficiencies that the organization will gain from using the system. Use emails, brown bags lunch meetings, training videos, company newsletters, or any communication medium to your organization uses to reach its employees. Communicate milestones in the Coupa implementation to all levels of your organization, including top executives. Everyone should be made aware of the successes with Coupa and the abilities the system offers. Obtaining the sponsorship of top management will support employee adoption.

Also make sure to link to your Coupa site from your company intranet pages for easy employee access.


Support Users

Supporting users is an ongoing process. It involves soliciting user feedback, providing ongoing training, and identifying user champions who will help their co-workers day to day. Here are some ideas for providing user support:

  • Conduct a survey – Their are several free survey tools (www.surveymonkey.com, www.zoomerang.com) that you can use to capture employee sentiment for the new processes and technology. Use surveys periodically to sample user opinions—and then act on them when warranted.
  • Encourage user champions – Identify users who are enthusiastic about Coupa and encourage them to help others. Leverage their success to help inspire others.
  • Address problems quickly and publicly – Consider any problems an early warning. Fix problems and configure the application based on feedback immediately. Communicate to users how the problems were solved and how their feedback directly impacted the application.
  • Offer refresher training – Additional or "refresher" training doesn't have to be formal; just make sure it's appropriate for each user group. For example, buyers and accounts payable clerks will have different issues and will need different refresher sessions.

Measure Adoption

Before you can improve adoption, you need to establish a baseline against which to measure change. Then you can use incentives to actively encourage adoption. Develop simple metrics to measure the successes in your Coupa environment. These metrics should be measurable items, which you are able to take action on to improve. The metrics are also a good tool for communication with upper management.

Use the different reporting options available through Coupa to track usage by different users. The most common measurement of adoption is the # of requisitions created, but this should not be the only measure. For a more detailed analysis of usage and adoption, consider these measurements:

  • Percentage of spend through Coupa – How much of your organization spend is going through your Coupa system? If it's not 100% of what you were expecting, then reach out to those owners of spend to help them use Coupa.
  • Automation - How many of your PO's are sent automatically to your vendors without buyer intervention?    Many vendors take orders in via email or cXML, so ensuring that you have automated ordering allows key people in your organization to manage exceptions, instead of having to place orders all day. That will help create more stickiness with Coupa.

Encourage adoption

Many customers find offering incentives to users can have a big payoff. Here are a few suggestions for encouraging employee adoption:
  • Identify and reward the strongest adopters. For example, this measurement can be based on the number of useful tags created or the number of questions they've answered from other users. Business process compliance can also be measured through the system, an example is user with the lowest percentage of non PO backed invoices. One company gave away gift cards to the strongest adopters.
  • Communicate about new product features that will help users in their daily work.
  • Take the approach, "If it isn't in Coupa, it doesn't exist."
  • Tie adoption to compensation.

Mandate reporting

Some customers have been successful at rapid adoption by requiring management reporting to be done out of Coupa. Coupa offers many standard reports and custom reporting features through our custom views. By requiring the reporting to be done out of Coupa, it reinforces that management is behind the usage of the system and has adopted it as the real-time spend analysis tool for indirect spend.