Colombia announced a deal on Wednesday with a US company to help streamline government finances and allegedly save $1 billion in spending.
US procurement company Coupa, a leading provider of cloud solutions for finance, signed a contract with the government on Wednesday and will be working to purchase fuel, vehicle insurance, hardware (computers, printers, scanners), security services for buildings and government offices and IT services.
“Coupa has a very successful record helping governments reduce costs,” said Rob Bernshteyn, chief executive officer of Coupa, which is good as the Colombian government are targeting savings of $1 billion by the third quarter of 2014.
Before the implementation of Coupa, Colombia’s 6,500 government entities were purchasing independently of each other. Now, on top of the savings arising from the aggregation of demand, the procurement officers only spend close to an hour with purchase orders whereas they used to spend close to three months in the contracting process.
The deal was signed as part of Colombian President, Juan Manuel Santos’ “Colombia buys Efficiently” (CCE) initiative created in 2011 to encourage more efficient spending across all entities. According to Bernshteyn, “We’re delighted that the CCE is using Coupa to eliminate waste and improve efficiencies for the entire Colombian government.”
“Coupa is the cornerstone that will help make this initiative successful,” said Paca Zuleta, Executive Director at Colombia Compra Eficiente and was chosen for its ease-of-use, scalability, and best-in-class cloud technology ie one network linking many computers in order to facilitate data sharing and increase efficiency.
More than 400 Colombian public servants are already using Coupa, and that number is expected to grow in the next two years to 20,000 across all 6,500 government entities such as the military, hospitals, Ministry of Defense and Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
Sources
- Colombia Turns to Coupa to Streamline Public Procurement (Nearshore Americas)
- Colombian Government Deploys Coupa to Achieve $1 Billion in Savings (Market Wired)
- Colombia escoge Coupa Software para obtener US$1.000mn en ahorros (BN Americas)