Think about what it takes to reach base camp on a serious climb. Months of preparation. Logistics, equipment, acclimatisation. A team of people coordinated around a single goal. And then you get there, and you look up, and you realise that the mountain is still in front of you.
Go-live feels a lot like that. The implementation is a genuine achievement. It takes significant effort, real expertise, and sustained organisational will to get there. And then the system goes live, the project board sends a congratulatory email, and the team that got you to base camp starts to pack up and head home.
What nobody said loudly enough is that base camp is not the destination. It is the point from which the actual climb begins.
The organisations that get the most from Coupa are the ones that understood this from the start. The ones that planned not just for go-live, but for what comes after it. Because that period, the first twelve months on the mountain, is where the real distance gets covered. Or does not.
What the view looks like from base camp
There is something genuinely valuable that go-live produces, beyond the system itself.
For the first time, you can see how your organisation operates. Not the version from workshops or process maps drawn six months ago. How it works, at scale, with real transactions, real suppliers, and real people under operational conditions. You can see where approvals are stacking up. Where spend is sitting outside the system. Which suppliers are creating friction, and which are not. It is, for many organisations, the clearest view they have ever had of their own procurement and finance activity.
The problem is what happens to that view at exactly the moment it appears. Just at the point where you start to understand how you really work, that is when you start to lose the ability to affect effective change.
Without a deliberate plan for this transition, the signals that go-live reveals go unread. Small things go unfixed. Workarounds appear and quietly become normal. A supplier invoicing by email because the portal setup was never quite completed. A manual spreadsheet running alongside the system because a report does not look right. A process being bypassed because nobody has had the bandwidth to resolve a configuration issue flagged at go-live.
None of these are failures. They are the normal friction of any system meeting real life for the first time. What matters is whether your organisation has the capacity to see them, name them, and move through them.
Most post-go-live plans do not answer that question. If yours did not, that is the first thing worth fixing.
Two conversations that need to be the same one
When an organisation buys and implements Coupa, there are two very different conversations happening simultaneously:
One is at the leadership level: strategic alignment, business objectives, the case for investment, what success looks like over the next three years.
The other is at the operational level, does this process make my job easier or harder, why do I have to do it this way, what happens if I do not.
Both conversations are completely legitimate. The trouble is that they almost never meet. Leadership knows why the organisation bought Coupa. The person processing invoices does not, and nobody has told them in a way that is relevant to their day.
Getting people to understand why what we are doing aligns with your corporate objectives is important. But so is what is in it for me at an individual level. If you only have one of those conversations, you will not get far with the other.
This is why adoption problems persist long after the training sessions are done, and the comms have gone out. The training answered the how. It did not answer the why, at the level that changes behaviour. And the why that moves a CFO is a completely different why to the one that moves the accounts payable team.
The organisations that close this gap do not do it with better communications plans. They do it by making both conversations happen, repeatedly, and by treating the distance between them as a live problem to be managed rather than a one-time change to be delivered.
When that gap stays open, it shows up as resistance, workarounds, and compliance numbers that refuse to improve. When it closes, the system starts to move with the organisation rather than against it.
Someone has to own the next part of the climb
Ask yourself directly: who in your organisation is responsible for making sure Coupa keeps improving? Not keeping it running. Not answering support tickets. Actively identifying the next step, making the case for it, and driving it through.
In most organisations, the honest answer is that nobody has that as their primary job. There is often a name attached to the responsibility, but that person is also doing several other things, and this is the one that gets deprioritised when the week gets busy.
” I always cringe a little when I hear: someone will take care of this, but they already have a full-time job. If you are only giving this five percent of someone’s time, that is not enough. ”
A genuine owner changes the picture significantly. Someone who knows the platform well enough to spot where a configuration change removes a bottleneck that has become invisible through familiarity. Who can see where data is drifting. Who has a sense of what the next stage of the climb looks like and the authority to start moving towards it.
The progress this enables does not need to be dramatic. A configuration fix that removes friction people had stopped bothering to mention. Reporting that gives leadership a reliable view for the first time. A supplier onboarding process properly completed rather than left at eighty percent. None of these are large. They compound.
An implementation without clear post-go-live ownership is not finished. It is just paused.
The organisations that make significant progress with Coupa after go-live are not the ones that had the smoothest implementations. They are the ones that treated go-live as the beginning of something, not the end.
They kept the right people engaged. They paid attention to what the system and their people were telling them. They understood that the distance between where they were and where they wanted to be was real but coverable, one step at a time, with the right support on the route.
That is not an intimidating prospect. Most of what makes the difference is not complicated. It just requires someone to be paying attention, with the knowledge and the mandate to act.
The mountain is in front of you. The question is whether you have what you need to climb it.
Working with Parade
We work with Coupa customers who are past go-live and want to understand where they are on the path, what is slowing them down, and what it takes to move further along. Whether that means stabilising something that has drifted, addressing an adoption problem, getting reporting right, or working out what the next stage looks like.
We have been on this mountain many times. We know the terrain.
