Most case studies end at go-live. This one is mostly about what happened afterwards.
An automotive distribution group in Malaysia set out in 2021 to put procurement onto Coupa, with Autoline as its dealer management system.
Implementation is the part everyone plans for. What follows is harder to anticipate and rarely budgeted: the finance system underneath is replaced, tax and budget rules change, a sister company wants the same capability, and the printed purchase order needs to say something different for each legal entity.
A platform either absorbs that or it calcifies, and people start working around it.
2021 — implementation. Coupa procure-to-pay and supplier information management, with invoice capture, advanced analytics, sales and service tax configuration, approval workflows, contracts and budget functionality. Supplier enablement, training and testing ran alongside. The dealer management system was integrated through an OK-to-pay file from Coupa. It went live and reached production closure with no outstanding hypercare issues.
2022 — running it. The transformation of the OK-to-pay file into the format the dealer management system consumes was monitored and maintained as an ongoing service, with defined escalation rather than best effort.
2023 — the finance system was replaced. The group moved to SAP S/4HANA. A new chart of accounts was built inside the existing Coupa instance to match the S/4HANA structure, with functional support to the group's own SAP team through design, build, system integration testing, user acceptance testing, deployment and hypercare. The SAP-side development belonged to the client and their integration partner, not to us; our part was the procurement platform and what the migration meant for it.
2023 — and then the parts nobody scopes. Purchase orders already issued but not yet fully invoiced still carried the old chart of accounts. A middleware and API process identified them, took business confirmation on each, and revised their accounting combinations to the new structure. Separately, the SAP description field is fifty characters where Coupa's is longer; in-flight purchase orders and invoices were updated through the API so the two agreed.
2024 — control, not just automation. Budgets and budget lines were configured alongside accounting segment changes, and capital expenditure requisition and invoice approval chains built with group approvers and controls that prevent an over-budget submission being raised at all. The intent was to retire a duplicate physical approval step for capital spend.
2024–25 — a second entity. A sister operating company was brought onto the same Coupa instance with two charts of accounts mirroring S/4HANA, reusing the approval structure already proven in the first entity rather than designing a second one. It went live and closed with no open user acceptance testing or hypercare items.
2026 — the detail. Purchase order output was tailored per entity across the three charts of accounts: the right company name on each, commodity removed from the printed order, and line-level notes and a pre-order reference added.
Every phase described here is live and in production.
Valtatech is software vendor agnostic. The technology named here is what this client selected; we start from requirements, operating model and existing systems. See how we approach Source to Pay →
The 2023 work is the part worth dwelling on, because it is the part nobody puts in a business case. Replacing an ERP is scoped as a finance programme. The procurement platform in front of it inherits two problems that only appear once the new chart of accounts exists: live purchase orders coded to accounts that no longer apply, and a field length mismatch between two systems that previously never had to agree.
Neither is difficult. Both are invisible until they are urgent, and both are the difference between a migration that completes and one that leaves a tail of exceptions somebody reconciles by hand for a year.
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