Coupa Inspire: Chris Courtemanche at Glencore

Chris Courtemanche, Global Coupa Process Owner at Glencore, explains how the diversified natural resources giant tackled a fragmented procurement landscape spanning multiple ERP systems and regionalised spend.

Talking to Procurement Magazine at Coupa Inspire 2026, Chris discusses the contract leakage issues that drove Glencore's business case for Coupa, the centralised sourcing maturity the platform has since enabled and how it helped the business weather the pandemic by supporting remote supplier engagement. He also offers advice for organisations hesitant to begin their own transformation journey.

Can you walk us through that shift from the fragmented processes and low visibility, to having centralised control of spend and approvals?

Glencore is a very diversified natural resources company, but with that comes some challenges, because each of the commodities tends to have its own ERP system. We had a scenario where we had a very big regionalised spend spread across a number of different ERP systems – and we weren't in a place to do a single ERP rollout.

We had to find a solution, so we looked at the market and did a comparison of some of the key market leaders, and that landed on Coupa. It was really about bringing all of those different ERP systems and all of those different spends and different processes into one single space.

We had scenarios where we negotiated great contracts, but the same item that had a contract price was bought at different prices across all those business units. So, we really had a contract leakage issue, and that was the core of our business case around Coupa.

How does the Coupa platform lend itself to centralisation? What value have you already seen?

It really brought us to the next level of maturity. We now have regional sourcing teams in place — strategic teams that look at spend trends across the market and negotiate these great multi-year contracts.

We have high contract compliance and very low leakage across those agreements, because we manage the data and the spend in a central place rather than depending on different ERP teams to upload and manage that data. It hasn't done the work for us, but it's been a great enabler to that maturity that we've been looking for.

I'd love to hear a specific example of when having Coupa added more value to the business. 

There are a lot of examples. Before Coupa we were pretty paper-based. The pandemic came along and of course we had to push people out of the office.

Luckily we had Coupa at the time, which enabled us to weather that storm. People worked remotely and we didn't have any issues with suppliers engaging us, because they were doing it electronically through the system – something we had never done before.

That was a great example of the opportunity Coupa brings.

Going through a transformation like this can be daunting and a lot of people may be sitting on the fence. What would you say to anyone who is hesitating? 

When we were going through this, we were also quite tentative and cautious ourselves. But when you really start putting it together, the business case is very easy to make.

Look at your data; make sure you understand where the issues lie – contract leakage, for instance. I'm sure you'll find it if you are on an ERP system and not on cloud software.

Make sure you're really looking in detail at some of those trends in your data. Once you fully understand the data, you'll see the business case pretty clearly.