Coupa Supplier Portal

Guided Onboarding

Transforming supplier activation with a consumer-grade onboarding experience

Outcome

After launching Guided Onboarding:

Supplier accounts grew by 300 percent, surpassing 1 million.
Profile completion jumped from 6 percent → 40 percent.
Monthly active suppliers increased 235 percent.

This feature became one of the highest-impact adoption drivers in Coupa’s supplier ecosystem.

The problem

Suppliers were invited by customers to transact through Coupa, but the experience fell apart during registration & onboarding.

The old flow began with a long, disorganized form and then dropped them into a blank dashboard with no guidance on how to set up company info, compliance details, delivery preferences, or invoicing rules.

Key issues:

Low registration completion
Even lower profile completion
Suppliers unable to transact because they didn’t know what was required
Customers frustrated by stalled onboarding and manual follow-up

We needed a way to get suppliers activated quickly, without forcing them to learn an enterprise platform upfront.

Who we designed for

Small suppliers: owner-operators who needed the simplest possible path.
Mid-market & enterprise suppliers: specialists in finance, legal, or logistics who touched only parts of the setup.
Customers: procurement teams who relied on supplier readiness to transact efficiently.

My role

Lead UX Designer on a small cross-functional team (2 designers, 2 engineers, 1 PM).

I co-created the onboarding strategy, led research, designed the flows/UI, and partnered with customers and suppliers to validate each iteration.

What I did

Turned enterprise onboarding into a consumer-grade workflow

Created a guided first-login experience that surfaced only the essential steps required to transact.
Applied progressive disclosure to avoid overwhelming suppliers with enterprise terminology or complex configuration.
Designed flexible paths for suppliers who needed to hand off tasks to colleagues in finance, legal, or compliance.

Grounded every decision in real supplier data

Interviewed 3 customers and 3 suppliers, plus additional suppliers who registered but never transacted.
Mapped pain points across registration, profile setup, and transaction readiness.
Ran iterative prototype reviews with the same users to confirm clarity and ease of use.

Focused on the only metric that mattered: activation

Simplified the data requirements down to the bare minimum needed to start transacting.
Reworked the information architecture to reduce dead-ends and confusion.
Tightened copy to feel like a modern consumer app, not a procurement system.

Impact

This redesign fundamentally changed how suppliers adopt the platform

300 percent increase in total Supplier Portal accounts (now over 1 million).
6 percent → 40 percent improvement in profile completion.
235 percent increase in monthly active suppliers.

Customers reported fewer manual follow-ups, faster PO-to-invoice cycles, and greater trust that their suppliers were “portal-ready” from day one.

What this reinforced for me

When designing for external stakeholders (suppliers), you have to meet them with the simplicity they expect from consumer apps, not the complexity of enterprise ecosystems.
Progressive disclosure and task-focused onboarding are powerful levers for activation and long-term adoption.
Success in enterprise UX is often measured by how well you help someone who doesn’t work for you understand what to do next.