Coupa's Dean Bain: Building the Future of Supply Chain

Coupa Inspire London brought a sharper focus and more selective audience to the capital, with an agenda that leaned heavily into supply chain strategy, while showcasing the full Coupa suite with an emphasis on data, AI and the strength of connected networks. It was a gathering that blended strategic direction with technical insight, offering practical takeaways and customer-led success stories.

At the centre of that conversation was Dean Bain, General Manager of Coupa’s supply chain practice. His role spans global teams across North America, South America, Europe and Asia-Pacific, with full profit and loss responsibility for the entire supply chain portfolio. That includes shaping Coupa’s product and technology direction, guiding go-to-market efforts, overseeing delivery and ensuring customer success.

We spoke with Dean during the London event to hear more about his journey, the evolution of Coupa’s strategy and where digital supply chains go next.

How do you find the cross-department collaboration within procurement and supply chain teams? 

In regards to our customers, it's interesting. Coupa acquired Llamasoft about five years ago now. The Llamasoft name had a strong synergy in the industry for supply chain optimisation, very well known.

Building that recognition of Coupa and supply chain has been part of this journey and one of the reasons I was brought on the last two years. The synergies across supply chain, collaboration, sourcing and pay are critical to businesses. Our customers are coming to us looking for those capabilities. Even when we acquired Llamasoft, the number of customers we shared told a story that there were synergies that needed to be enabled.

We had a presentation earlier from AB InBev and the visual on the screen clearly showed that supply chain strategy and design sits at the epicentre of their entire business model. As they think about their contracts and sourcing, who they source their raw materials from, their relationships with logistics carriers and their network, how they serve demand and their customers by regions, and ultimately how they bring that all together to drive efficiencies and savings for their shareholders.

Has that changed since you joined Coupa? How do you think that kind of supply chain focus and supply chain at the heart of an organisation has influenced the software?

It's changed since I joined Coupa, but what's really driving the change is the sheer unpredictability of supply chain volatility today. It's not necessarily what we are doing—we're reacting to what is shaping our world and what's shaping our business and challenging our customers.

Supply chain strategy and design used to be somewhat of a siloed function that was really looking at how to drive cost savings across my network, which is still one critical component.

Today, though, it's becoming much more of a closed loop. The whole process around supply chain strategy is becoming a recurring theme, a democratised enabler of business where we want to look at all the trade-offs we have to make, where there's disruption and predict what we can do differently, but we want to be ahead of that. We don't want to be reactive; we want to be proactive.

Now, it's coming together in a fashion where this closed loop cycle of understanding not just the old way of "what do we want to look like this year or next year," but it's measuring against that. You put that blueprint in place, you go operate against it, disruption happens, the plan goes awry. You can't execute to the vision, you never can. But then how do you learn from that? How do you take what actually happened? How do you take data?

This is the critical piece we've been exploring the last two years—really the data from supply chain planning systems of record, the data from ERP, bringing that all back into the platform, harnessing that data so we can truly understand what did we say we were going to do, how did we actually do it, or how did we perform to that plan? What went wrong? What could we have done differently? What would we do next time? Is there a way we could have prevented that or predicted that or had a contingency plan in place?

Are there any specific customer stories that come to mind when you think about global disruption and navigating that?

There are many examples. Across our entire portfolio, we have more than 350 customers in supply chain and more than 3,000 in the Coupa family.

The beauty of Coupa and what we do is 20 of the top 25 Gartner supply chains run on Coupa supply chain. If you look across our portfolio they're all, for the most part, publicly traded, Fortune 2000 companies. These aren't small enterprises; they're global enterprises building centres of excellence, not just centrally located in one region, but expanding those teams into other regions.

What do you believe makes Coupa stand out from the crowd? 

At the end of the day, technology is an enabler. I'm very proud of the technology we have. I believe that we have the most feature-rich capabilities of anyone in the marketplace. But at the end of the day, you don't choose a company for this—it's a factor, but not the deciding factor.

What truly differentiates Coupa is our people. We've been doing this for over 20 years, and when you look at the team, especially across our supply chain team, it's our ability to convey and build trust and credibility with our customers. But not just that; that's kind of the early stages of dating—building that trust and credibility—but it's delivering on those promises.

As we think about ensuring that the results we analyse through consulting opportunities or our partners have done for our customers, how do we ensure that actually occurs on a recurring basis? How do we ensure that we actually receive those benefits? How do we ensure that the outputs are stable and trustworthy in the sense that we can take that to our board and ask for investment decisions to be made?

It comes down to our people. We spend a tremendous amount of time with our customers and we deliver some very unique functions, not only across your typical customer success or customer value managers as we call them, but we have a very strong, unique team that have come from industry that we call customer adoption managers.

They're almost like the copilot. They sit with our customers, get to know their business, understand their challenges. They're only a phone call away. When they really are looking to deliver something in a crunch or need some support and guidance outside of technical support, they want to understand "We have this opportunity. How do we go do this?" They're the experts you call, and that's where the value comes from.

If you had one bit of advice for supply chain and procurement professionals in 2025, what would it be?

The opportunity to truly harness and build value, differentiation and predictability in business is breaking down silos. The silos still exist, and technology and us trying to link the technology together can only do so much. There's so much opportunity out there if we can get finance, procurement, supply chain operations all on the same page.

More and more, the world's a better place. We drive far better resiliency, we drive far less emissions, we do things so much more effectively.

Today's businesses are still struggling with that because you've got each of the functions with their own KPIs, their own measures, their own goals. If you take something as rudimentary as distribution and logistics, distribution's measure is on time in full, logistics' measure is usually on transportation costs. But if you don't have the inventory at the right place at the right time, it's very difficult to be on time and in full. And what do we end up doing? We expedite, and when we expedite, we drive transportation costs up. And so you have two departments that are working against each other instead of harmoniously on a single sheet of music trying to figure out what's best.

As we think about where we're going and the evolution of our technology, as we think about this data layer sitting on top of ERP, sitting on top of supply chain planning systems of record, we see a tremendous opportunity to take your IBP and SNOP processes and streamline those across strategy, to harness that data, to bring everyone on the same page so that we're being much more proactive than reactive in that decision making.

What do you believe is the future of supply chain, both for your customers and for future evolutions of Coupa? Is AI involved in that?

Absolutely. The big thing for me is we’re truly at this inflection point of technology. When we think about going through the different revolutions of technology, from Industrial Revolution through to the internet, through all of the phases, AI is at a point where even just a year ago, it was still a buzzword.

The conversation last year was like, "If you can't really tell me the use case for AI, is it real?" AI is real now. The number of use cases—I think we've identified 38 different use cases across the Coupa portfolio at this time. And as you think about all the different AI agents that can be built and how they can be leveraged within the context of supply chain, procurement, finance—they’re going to become a true enabler.

But what's important is not just the technology, but how you apply it. Coupa is very focused on making sure that the AI we are embedding is actionable, that it is trustworthy, that it is giving you insights that you can actually use in your business. That is the next evolution.

If you look at our product roadmap, you’ll see that we are embedding AI into our core workflows. It’s not just about dashboards and reports, it’s about being able to suggest actions, to make recommendations, to help you predict risk before it happens. We’re looking at scenarios where you can say, "If I make this decision, what are the likely outcomes?" and then have AI help you evaluate those outcomes in real-time.

The future for supply chain is about combining the power of data, AI and people. The data gives you the foundation, AI gives you the speed and the intelligence, but it’s the people - the supply chain professionals, the procurement professionals - who make the final decisions. It’s about giving them the tools to be more proactive, to be more predictive, and to be able to respond to disruption in minutes instead of days or weeks.

Any final thoughts or advice you’d like to share with our audience?

My final thought is that the next couple of years are going to be some of the most exciting and challenging for supply chain and procurement professionals.

The pace of change is accelerating, but so is the opportunity. If you can embrace technology, if you can break down silos, if you can focus on collaboration across your organisation, you’re going to be able to drive real value for your business. And at Coupa, we’re here to help you on that journey.

We’re excited about the future and we’re excited to be part of your team as you navigate the challenges ahead.

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