Home > Supply Chain Management Software > Coupa > Coupa vs IBM Sterling

Coupa vs IBM Sterling

Last Updated: November 18th, 2024

Our analysts compared Coupa vs IBM Sterling based on data from our 400+ point analysis of Supply Chain Management Software, user reviews and our own crowdsourced data from our free software selection platform.

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Product Basics

Coupa provides contingent workforce management and business spend management capabilities to drive visibility while mitigating risk and ensuring spend optimization. It allows users to source contingent workers with secure onboarding and manage them optimally. It also allows users to manage contracts and treasury efficiently.

Companies can leverage it for service provider sourcing, service procurement and supplier collaboration, compliance, spend analysis, travel and expense management, and other capabilities.

IBM Sterling is an open, integrated platform that leverages advanced technologies like AI and blockchain to connect with the supplier ecosystem. It provides real-time insights, end-to-end visibility and recommended measures to transform interruptions into customer engagement, profit and growth opportunities.

It offers support for supplier, inventory and order management. Users can build smarter business networks using business process improvement, supply chain visibility, supplier collaboration, manufacturing solutions, order fulfillment and retail solutions. It also supports B2B collaboration to fulfill ongoing business demands, minimize complexity and reduce costs.

$499 Annually

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Product Insights

Optimized Spending: Ensure that employees are driven to preferred suppliers to ensure paying competitive rates to contingent workers.
Accurate Performance Tracker: Track worker performance accurately and gain valuable insights about the money spent for contingent services.
Improved Decisions: Mitigate risks with effective strategic decision-making by using actionable insights.
Supply Chain Visibility: Increase supply chain visibility and predictability while minimizing supply chain risk.
Better Back-Office Efficiency: Automate screening and hiring procedures according to business needs to focus on more strategic decisions.
Improved Productivity: Review interim and final deliverables, and rate performances to deliver maximum value and avoid execution issues.

Evolve Business Processes: Maintain business continuity, reduce operational silos, respond to market disruptions and mitigate risks with intelligent workflows. Improve interactions between people, data and processes through its experts and reduce inventory costs with process improvements.
Improve Visibility: Supply chain stakeholders can access data related to inventory, order processes, delivery and potential disruptions. Improves customer service, assists with regulatory directives and mitigates interruptions affecting supplier inventory levels and product delivery with advanced insights.
Supplier Collaboration: Streamline collaboration to drive efficiencies, increase supplier satisfaction, resolve disruptions for procure-to-pay transactions and order-to-cash with supplier collaboration solutions and global business networks. Quickly respond to supplier issues with embedded AI capabilities like cycle time prediction, anomaly detection and next-best-action recommendations.
Deliver Customer Promises: Track orders from inception to delivery, manage data and processes and gain visibility into all orders throughout channels. Offers various solutions that include order management, order fulfillment, inventory management and digital store operations.
Enhance Manufacturing Management: Innovate supply chain management by transforming outdated processes, uncovering hidden insights and delivering superior customer experience with automation, IoT, AI and blockchain. It helps avoid disruptions, improve visibility, respond quickly and streamline planning and optimization.
Retail Technology Services: Evolve the shopping experience with advanced retail solutions for fulfilling digital demands. Revitalize customer engagement by delivering omnichannel marketing messages and offers tailored to the customer base. Minimize disruptions to the supply chain through various retail technology solutions.

Sourcing Service Providers: Source the right talent using a resume index and initiate temporary or SOW-based project work requests easily.
Collaboration: Release work orders to suppliers and allow tracking of details about work completion and progress. Keep everyone updated on the status of the deliverables.
Onboarding and Offboarding: Onboard and offboard contingent workers securely and with ease to ensure optimum efficiency and to get more value for the spending.
Compliance: Ensure suppliers meet SLAs, as well as comply with company policies and laws regarding temporary labor in complex contracts.
Artificial Intelligence: Access and leverage talent with the right skills set using recommendations from an AI-supported resume index.

Business Network: Offers cloud-based and security-rich connectivity with suppliers, partners and customers. Ensure timely order deliveries with real-time intelligence and recommendations through AI capabilities. Provides multi-party visibility of digital events throughout the supply chain via blockchain, empowering transparency and trust.
Food Trust: Connects participants through an immutable, permissioned and shared record of processing details, food provenance, transaction data and more through its collaborative network. Trace the location and status of food products, including essential details like multi-ingredient and farm-store view.
Visibility Insights: Optimize performance by correlating data from disparate and siloed systems, creating digital playbooks and capturing organizational knowledge. Accelerate time to value, get intelligent insights, manage inventory and mitigate disruptions to meet demand through the inventory control tower. Supply chain intelligence services help boost data integration by developing purpose-built control towers using a control tower solution blueprint.
TradeLens Platform: Gain access to a supply chain and logistics network with over half of the global container shipping volume data coverage through an interconnected supply chain partners system. Every shipment party can access their information and all transactions’ audit trails using its permission matrix. Offers services and apps developed by TradeLens and third parties to accelerate innovation and value creation.
Trust Your Supplier: Identify, onboard and manage qualified suppliers through a blockchain-based solution. It helps expedite supplier onboarding, lower procurement operating costs, reduce compliance risk, speed new supplier assessments, access verified data and streamline insight sharing.
Business Transaction Intelligence: Provides insights into B2B transaction lifecycles. Offers multi-part shared transaction visibility and empowers users with real-time visibility and self-service. Prevents potential risks by giving discrepancy alerts on B2B transaction anomalies.
Transaction Manager: Automates manual B2B transactions and helps save money and time by cutting costs, reducing errors and elevating user satisfaction with customers, non-EDI suppliers and other trading partners. Gain unified visibility throughout supply chain partner transactions and onboard non-technical trading partners.
Document Conversion Services: Converts manual transactions and non-structured documents like email, pdf and fax into EDI or other structured formats. Provides various features, including advanced OCR to read images, customized exception handling, multiple language support and ICR technology to recognize handwriting.
Order Management: Ensures omnichannel order fulfillment by combining inventory and delivery visibility, multichannel order aggregation and service availability in a single platform. It helps customize monitoring and alerts, take immediate actions on capacity, deliver order promises with intelligent fulfillment and use reverse logistics to track inventory.
Fulfillment Optimizer with Watson: Enhance existing order management systems and minimize cost-to-serve with cognitive analytics engine. Retailers can utilize store capacity, balance protecting margins and meet delivery expectations, increasing profits.
Inventory Visibility: Explore product highlights and find use-case specific solutions. Users can personalize dashboards, balance inventory across channels, track inventory velocity, enable drop shipping, leverage autoscaling, get real-time views with the Cassandra database, Akamai gateways and more.
Store Engagement: Gain inventory, customer and order data view through an intuitive user-interface, accessible from mobile devices and sales counters. Provides cross-sell and up-sell recommendations, enables flexible fulfillment options, helps standardize processes for task and inventory management and manages returns throughout channels using purpose-built tools.

Product Ranking

#37

among all
Supply Chain Management Software

#19

among all
Supply Chain Management Software

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Analyst Rating Summary

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Coupa

IBM Sterling

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User Sentiment Summary

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84%

of users recommend this product

IBM Sterling has a 'great' User Satisfaction Rating of 84% when considering 47 user reviews from 5 recognized software review sites.

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4.1 (38)

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Synopsis of User Ratings and Reviews

Streamlined Procurement: Coupa simplifies the purchasing process, making it easier for employees to buy what they need while adhering to company policies. The platform offers features like guided buying, which helps users find the right products and suppliers, and automated approvals, which speed up the procurement cycle.

Enhanced Visibility: Coupa provides real-time visibility into spending, allowing businesses to track expenses, identify savings opportunities, and make more informed decisions. The platform offers customizable dashboards and reports that give users insights into key metrics, such as spend by category, supplier performance, and contract compliance.

Improved Supplier Management: Coupa helps businesses manage their supplier relationships more effectively. The platform offers tools for supplier onboarding, performance management, and risk assessment. This can help businesses reduce supplier risk, improve supplier quality, and negotiate better pricing.

Integration: It supports integration with multiple external systems, as noted by 88% of reviewers who mention integration.

Customization: It offers highly customizable tools and features, as observed by 50% of the users who refer to reports.

Ease of Use: It offers a flexible platform that is easy to use, manage and modify, as noted by all the reviewers specifying ease of use.

Customization Challenges: Tailoring Coupa to specific workflows can be complex and time-consuming, often requiring significant IT support or external consultants. This can be a barrier for organizations with unique or evolving supply chain needs.

Usability Concerns: The user interface can feel clunky and unintuitive, leading to a steep learning curve for new users. Coupa's extensive features and functionalities can overwhelm users, making it difficult to navigate and locate specific information efficiently.

Integration Complexities: Integrating Coupa with existing ERP or other enterprise systems can pose challenges and require additional development effort. This can impact data consistency and hinder seamless information flow across different platforms.

Cost Considerations: Coupa's pricing structure can be complex and may involve multiple modules or add-ons depending on specific requirements. This can make it difficult to accurately predict and manage overall costs, especially for growing organizations with evolving needs.

Learning Curve: It is complicated to understand and involves a steep learning curve, as stated by 57% of the users who report learning curve.

Interface: Over 50% of reviewers that mentioned the interface stated that the interface is not user-friendly and intuitive.

Resource-Intensive: It consumes a large amount of system resources, as observed by all reviewers referring to system resource utilization.

Implementation: Around 67% of the users who specified implementation report that the deployment and implementation process is cumbersome.

Coupa has been a major player in the Supply Chain Management software game for over a decade, but how does it stack up in 2024? User reviews from the past year paint a picture of a platform with strengths and weaknesses. On the plus side, Coupa consistently receives praise for its user-friendly interface and its ability to help businesses save money by streamlining procurement processes and providing greater visibility into spending. However, some users find Coupa's pricing to be on the higher end and feel the platform lacks the flexibility to adapt to their specific needs, especially when compared to competitors like SAP Ariba and Oracle SCM Cloud. Coupa's unified platform approach is a significant differentiator, offering a comprehensive suite of applications for managing spend, procurement, and supply chain activities, which can be a major advantage for businesses seeking an all-in-one solution. Yet, this can also be a drawback for those who only require specific functionalities, as they may end up paying for features they don't need. So, who is Coupa best suited for? It's a solid choice for mid-sized to large businesses looking for a user-friendly, cloud-based solution to gain better control over their spending and supply chain operations. However, businesses with unique requirements or budget constraints may want to explore other options that offer greater flexibility and affordability. Remember, the software landscape is constantly evolving, so it's always a good idea to check for the latest reviews and comparisons before making a decision.

IBM Sterling is a flexible and easy-to-use supply chain suite that helps its customers build dynamic and smarter business networks. It has a highly customizable platform and supports comprehensive integration capabilities with various external systems. Many reviewers have noted that it does not have an intuitive user interface, and the implementation process can be cumbersome. It involves a steep learning curve, and users find it complicated to understand. It also consumes a large amount of system resources, making it slow sometimes.

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FAQ

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