Situation report on use of the Coupa procurement portal after four months

Four months after it was rolled out, the project team and the Financial Affairs Department would like to share a brief report on use of the Coupa procurement portal.

Around 20,000 orders have been recorded, an average of 5,000 per month, which is similar to the volume observed in 2024.

Several issues have been reported, and special attention has been paid to all these issues, with efforts to improve usability or resolve the difficulties encountered.

Open desk sessions are continuing to be held. The next is scheduled for May 22, 2025. This is an opportunity to ask any questions and receive answers immediately, as far as possible.

Following requests from department directors:

-    An improvement has been made so that it is now possible to centralize the placement of orders to a given user profile (for example Lab Manager) while delegating receipt of the order to several staff members;
-    The feature to view orders for other teams has also been made available to the entire campus;
-   Work will take place in June to add additional items to the catalogs so that items which are not ordered frequently for the Institut Pasteur as a whole but are essential for specific departments (for example Biochemistry) are included. This will minimize the need to request quotes.

If you have any questions, please:

   •    Start by consulting the available documentation

   •    Send an email tol COUPA@pasteur.fr and the support team will answer you.

With regard to invoices and payments, there have been some significant delays in the payment of supplier invoices. These delays are mainly due to temporary technical problems:

•    The OCR invoice recognition software did not initially work as well as the service provider had claimed it would, and this slowed down the fully automated invoice processing phase;
•    The number of invoices needing to be matched to orders was higher than expected (problems with interfaces and settings).

We would remind you that the fully digital process requires each stage to be completed correctly, as follows:

•    The requester needs to place the order, and receipt of the order must be recorded in the tool (either by the Logistics Department or by the requester);
•    The supplier invoice must include the order number.

Exceptional measures have been taken to address the problem as quickly as possible:

•    Regarding the invoice recognition software, considerable efforts were made to pressure the software company to address the performance issues, and there have since been significant improvements;
•    A decision was made to hire additional temporary staff at short notice to boost the supplier accounts teams;
•    For selected strategic suppliers (science, CMIP, building works), an exceptional invoice payment process was adopted;
•    If the Financial Affairs Department is made aware of any invoices involving a specific operational risk (e.g. an interruption in deliveries), these invoices are systematically paid as a matter of priority. Any such cases must be reported to your managers (‘Gestion’) so that they can notify the accounting team;
•    A message has been sent out to all suppliers. You can see the message here. Please feel free to refer to it as necessary.

Considerable support and assistance has been provided for this transition phase – a support team, dedicated documents, an FAQ and videos, and open desk sessions.

Please see ePasteur to find out more

A Coupa user committee will be set up so that we can continue to monitor rollout of the tool. This will enable us to implement operational solutions to address specific problems and to inform staff about best practices, changes to the tool, and tips and tricks.

To make sure the committee is representative of all users on campus, it will need to include department directors, assistants of scientific units, as well as PIs and lab managers.

You can join the committee by sending an email to Guillaume Frasca (guillaume.frasca@pasteur.fr) by Friday May 23.