
I keep hearing people use the term "punch outs", but I still have no idea what that really means. The charge code selection was done with a custom popup dialog triggered from the questionnaire page of the checkout wizard by clicking on a hyperlink in the question label (this part could have potentially been done using a web service-populated drop-down list question if request-on-behalf was not allowed). The Oracle import was done with a scheduled PowerShell script picking up CSV dumps from a network share (populated by a nightly dump from Oracle) and writing the data to custom tables in the App Portal database. It may be possible to do an integration via emails as you suggested, but I don't really know. If approved, the PO number was captured in the App Portal request notes and deployment of the software started in SCCM.Īll of this was implemented with a set of PowerShell scripts hitting the Coupa REST API's. If rejected, the request would be rejected/canceled in App Portal. App Portal would monitor the purchase request looking to see if it was approved (PO generated) or rejected. The buyer team would update some of the required data in the purchase request and route for budgetary approval within Coupa (this was in addition to manager approval in App Portal). Once charge codes were properly validated, a purchase request would be automatically created in Coupa and assigned to the buyer team. After submission, we validated the charge codes that were selected and sent the requester an email notification if the codes were invalid for that request (and paused the workflow until they were corrected). For the implementation we did, we were importing charge code data from Oracle (same source that was feeding Coupa) and prompting the requester to select the proper charge codes during checkout. Having said that, I'm sure there are multiple ways to do an integration and probably varying degrees of automation.

I believe it was about 6 weeks of effort, but now that we've done it once, it would hopefully take less time to repeat that. Flexera Services has done a custom integration with Coupa for another customer.
