CASE STUDY
AAA
COUPA DRIVES DOWN RISK FOR AAA INSURANCE WITH BETTER
SPEND MANAGEMENT PRACTICES
PAGE 1 of 2 CASE STUDY
CUSTOMER
AAA
LOCATION
Walnut Creek, CA
INDUSTRY
Banking & Financial Services
COMPANY SIZE
1,001 - 5,000
Coupa: We’d love to learn a little bit about CSAA. They’ve recently undergone a
name change, right?
Kathy: While CSAA is still marketed as AAA insurance, we’ve split off the AAA
Club travel and roadside assistance operations into a separate company. CSAA
maintains a business focus exclusively on the insurance side for auto, home and
other products. With the change, our goal is to expand the business coast-to-coast
AAA Northern California, Nevada & Utah is a trade association that provides its
members with an array of automotive, travel, insurance, and nancial products
and services. The association was formerly known as California State Automobile
Association Inter-Insurance Bureau. AAA Northern California, Nevada & Utah was
founded in 1907 and is based in Walnut Creek, California.
KATHY STONE, SENIOR MANAGER, STRATEGIC SOURCING
ONCE WE SAW WHAT THE TOOLS
WERE CAPABLE OF DOING,
THAT’S WHAT GOT US REALLY
EXCITED. JUST BEING ABLE TO
DEMONSTRATE THAT WE COULD
QUANTIFY THE SAVINGS WE
WERE GETTING YEAR OVER YEAR
WAS HUGE, BECAUSE ONE OF
THE THINGS THAT REALLY GETS
PEOPLE’S ATTENTION IS DATA AND
WE HAD A GREAT WAY TO SHOW
IT. WITH THE PRESS OF A BUTTON,
WE COULD START SEEING THINGS
THAT WE COULDN’T SEE BEFORE.
“
“
SUCCESS METRICS
Reduced rule exceptions from 300
to 25
Engaged rapid company-wide adoption
through intuitive interface and mobile
access
New ability to provide data to quantify
savings year over year
CASE STUDY
PAGE 2 of 2 CASE STUDY
across the United States. In fact, that expansion is one of the key reasons we started looking for
management solutions that could help us improve our process while building the organization.
Coupa: So it was about having better visibility into spend?
Kathy: Once we saw what the tools were capable of doing, that’s what got us really excited.
Just being able to demonstrate that we could quantify the savings we were getting year over
year was huge. Because one of the things that really gets people’s attention is data and we had
a great way to show it. Just with the press of a button, we could start seeing things that we
couldn’t see before.
Coupa: Was Coupa’s ability to operate in the cloud important to that objective?
Kathy: With Coupa, our ability to use mobile devices for approvals changed things signicantly.
We were able to get our executives and everybody on board right away. Turnaround time for
approvals and getting things pushed through the system improved immediately. And with
some of the other features, like automatic escalations, we no longer have invoices just sitting in
someone’s work queue. Now people get constant reminders, so that is a huge benet to us.
Coupa: Can you give us a sense of how much you accomplished?
Kathy: Well, one example I can give you is what we used to call the “just in cases”. In other
words, we used to manually manage a database of over 300 exceptions to the approval process
and now it’s reduced to less than 25. Now, we let Coupa handle that for us. While that’s an
enormous procedural change, the real advantage is that the entire chain of approval is much
more streamlined. Now, approval chains provide so much flexibility that the system is doing the
work for us.
Coupa: When you made the sourcing decision to move to Coupa, what were the one or two
things that put them over the top of the other suppliers you were looking at?
Kathy: First, Coupa’s SaaS service model gave us much greater control over conguration -
how the system is used and how it supports the business. The ability to make little tweaks as
needed without involving the IT department was a real advantage. But one of the things we like
most about Coupa is the fact that they are there with great support. When I’m trying to come
up with a creative way of processing something, I can always reach out to someone at Coupa
to help me. And it’s not like they come back and charge me every time I make a phone call. I feel
like Coupa really cares about us and our success with the system.
Coupa: How about user adoption and ease of use?
Kathy: CSAA chose Coupa because one of the highest priorities we set as we were looking at
different tools was ease of use. Coupa was so intuitive that with just some very basic training,
people were able to gure it out and be able to do some things we’ve never been able to do
before.
It’s the ability to see more that has gotten people excited and engaged. The proof of that was
that we actually got the system congured and trained everyone faster that it took to do the
contract itself. It was awesome.
Coupa: How would you compare pre-Coupa with post-Coupa? We always like to talk about
customer success and impact on the business.
Kathy: For us, it’s been relatively easy to see results right away. The visibility has been
phenomenal. The approval chains are providing so much flexibility that the system is doing the
work for us. It gives us easy reporting and data that we just couldn’t get our ngertips on before.
It’s been a lifesaver.
KATHY STONE, AAA
Coupa gives us
easy reporting
and data that we
just couldn’t get
our fingertips on
before. It’s been
a lifesaver.
“
“
